It's been nearly a month, and the fallout over the July 13th assassination attempt on Donald Trump is still piling up. In the latest episode, the former president informed FOX Business' Maria Bartiromo that Meta (Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg called him personally to apologize for the social media platforming's mislabeling of the iconic photo of Trump, face bloodied, holding his fist aloft. Facebook had initially listed the photo as "misinformation."
The photo showing Trump raising a fist after a July 13 assassination attempt at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, sliced his ear was initially labeled as misinformation on the social media site.
"So, Mark Zuckerberg called me. First of all, he called me two times. He called me after the event and he said that was really amazing," Trump told Bartiromo in a "Mornings with Maria" interview that aired Thursday. "It was really brave. And he actually announced that he's not going to support a Democrat because he can't because he respected me for what I did that day. I think what I did… to me, was a normal response."
"He actually apologized. He said they made a mistake… and they're correcting the mistake," Trump said, adding that Google never called him after the search engine's autocomplete function failed to show results for the Trump assassination attempt.
Zuckerberg had previously described Trump's immediate reaction to the assassination attempt as "bada**."
See Related: Mark Zuckerberg's Unexpected Reaction to Trump Assassination Attempt
Meta quickly confessed to the mislabeling.
Meta Vice President of Global Policy Joel Kaplan said in a July 30 statement that Meta incorrectly added a fact-check label to the assassination attempt photo, which quickly went viral and appeared in global news outlets, because the social media giant's AI detector tool "experienced an issue related to the circulation of a doctored photo of former President Trump with his fist in the air, which made it look like the Secret Service agents were smiling."
In other words, in the Meta/Facebook world, someone, somewhere, jumped the gun.
This is the problem with social media platforms (who, we hasten to add, are private companies) attempting to moderate what is and is not "misinformation." The temptation for the moderators in these outfits is clearly too much; someone who professes, say, Thomas Sowell as a more credible economist than Paul Krugman might be slapped down for peddling "misinformation," as all too often that term is defined as "thought that doesn't meet liberal/progressive guidelines." Better that the social media platforms let a thousand flowers bloom, and let folks figure out for themselves what is and isn't credible. This is the age of the internet, after all; we are into the third generation of Americans growing up in the Information Revolution, and while sometimes one must winnow a ton of chaff to find a grain of wheat, better we do the winnowing ourselves than to have faceless scolds sitting in a cubicle in Silicon Valley do it for us.
As for Google and its silence on the matter, we can only say this: DuckDuckGo.
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