Trump claims Facebook, Google censored assassination attempt content

Former President Trump criticized Facebook and Google on Tuesday for allegedly restricting content related to his assassination attempt. 

“Facebook has just admitted that it wrongly censored the Trump ‘attempted assassination photo,’ and got caught. Same thing for Google,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “They made it virtually impossible to find pictures or anything about this heinous act.” 

“Both are facing BIG BACKLASH OVER CENSORSHIP CLAIMS,” he continued. “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.” 

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, clarified Monday that a fact check was mistakenly applied to a photo of Trump raising his fist following the assassination attempt. 

“This was an error,” Meta spokesperson Dani Lever wrote on social platform X. “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. This has been fixed and we apologize for the mistake.” 

Trump has had a strained relationship with Facebook and its parent company Meta since the former president was banned from the platform in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.  

His account was reinstated in January 2023, and Meta announced earlier this month that it was removing additional guardrails that had remained on Trump’s account ahead of the November election. 

Google has also come under fire in recent days after its search engine was reportedly failing to autofill with potential search options about the assassination attempt on the former president, according to Newsweek. 

The tech giant told Newsweek that it is “working on improvements” and emphasized that autocomplete is “just a tool to help people save time, and they can still search for anything they want to.”