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Trump says Zuck called him to apologize after iconic pic censored by Facebook

August 6, 2024 | | Print Article

Former President Donald Trump said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called him and personally apologized after Facebook added a fact-check label to the iconic photo taken during last month’s failed assassination attempt.

Appearing recently on Fox Business Network’s Mornings with Maria, the 2024 Republican presidential nominee told host Maria Bartiromo that Zuckerberg told him he was “not going to support a Democrat” in the election.

“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, it was really brave,” Trump said. “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.”

“But I was called by Mark Zuckerberg yesterday, the day before, on the same subject and he actually apologized. He said they made a mistake, et cetera, et cetera and they’re correcting the mistake,” he continued.

Meta Vice President of Global Policy Joel Kaplan said in a statement that Meta incorrectly added a fact-check label to the assassination attempt photo because its 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.”

“Because the photo was altered, a fact check label was initially and correctly applied,” Kaplan said. “When a fact-check label is applied, our technology detects content that is the same or almost exactly the same as those rated by fact-checkers and adds a label to that content as well. Given the similarities between the doctored photo and the original image — which are only subtly (although importantly) different — our systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the real photo, too. Our teams worked to quickly correct this mistake.”

Trump noted that “nobody called from Google,” the comment being in response to an apparent anti-Trump bias in search results.

“One of the things like doing a show like yours… you see it on Fox, but when you really see it is all over the place, they take clips of your show that you’re doing right now with me. And if I do a good job, they’re going to vote for me,” he told Bartiromo. “They’re going to vote for me because it’s not just on Fox… you’re on all over those little beautiful cell phones you’re on, you’re all over the place.”

“You have a product, you have a great product. You have a great brand. So you have to get out, you have to get out, you have to do things like your show and other shows and Google has been very bad,” Trump explained.

“They’ve been very irresponsible and I have a feeling Google is going to be close to shut down because I don’t think Congress is going to take it. I really don’t think so,” he added. “Google has to be careful. Now, I will say this, I believe Mark Zuckerberg, he called me, he called me a lot. They are working and I think they fixed it, but he’s not doing what he did four years ago with the $500 million I don’t believe.”

Zuckerberg spent more than $400 million in 2020 to help finance local elections, a move that one former federal election official called a “carefully orchestrated attempt” to influence the vote.

Here’s a quick sampling of responses to the story from skeptical social media users, as seen on X:

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