Matt Gaetz accuses Facebook, Google of censoring info on Donald Trump assassination attempt

U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz said some of the nation’s top tech companies suppressed information about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. And he’d like the Homeland Security Department to do something about it.

The Fort Walton Beach Republican sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas accusing Facebook and Google of censoring information.

“Numerous news outlets have reported various irregularities in search results and home pages,” Gaetz said. “For example, Facebook has acknowledged that it censored an authentic photograph of Donald Trump as ‘false information’ and Google has acknowledged that it excludes and does not autocomplete results for searches relating to the Trump assassination attempt.”

The complaint from Gaetz comes a day after Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, levied similar accusations in a Truth Social post.

“Facebook has just admitted that it wrongly censored the Trump ‘attempted assassination photo,’ and got caught. Same thing for Google,” Trump posted.

“They made it virtually impossible to find pictures or anything about this heinous act. Both are facing BIG BACKLASH OVER CENSORSHIP CLAIMS. Here we go again, another attempt at RIGGING THE ELECTION!!! GO AFTER META AND GOOGLE. LET THEM KNOW WE ARE ALL WISE TO THEM, WILL BE MUCH TOUGHER THIS TIME. MAGA2024!”

For the record, Meta spokesperson Dani Lever acknowledged in a public statement that a photo of Trump was flagged by the platform for a period. The now-iconic photo shows Trump raising a first after being injured at a Pennsylvania rally this month. Lever said the problem arose because of doctored photos of the image being distributed online.

“This was an error. This fact check was initially applied to a doctored photo showing the secret service agents smiling, and in some cases our systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the real photo,” Lever posted on X. “This has been fixed and we apologize for the mistake.”

Google has denied that it has limited internet searches about the assassination attempt. The question arose after users shared images of searches where the autocomplete feature offered no assistance, even with searches that partially spelled out Trump’s name.

A Google spokesperson told The Associated Press that “no manual action was taken” to limit searches about Trump. Rather, tech experts asserted pre-existing limits existed involving searches with the term “assassination.”

“We’re rolling out improvements to our Autocomplete systems to show more up-to-date predictions,” Google said in a statement to the AP. “The issues are beginning to resolve, and we’ll continue to make improvements as needed.”