Why META's Most Intelligent AI Tool Calls Donald Trump's Assassination Attempt 'Fictional'

After Donald Trump survived a potential assassination attempt on July 13, 2024, many people questioned its authenticity, with some calling it "staged" or "fake." However, when the New York Post ran its own test to check what the tech giant's search result had to say about the shooting incident, it found that the AI said it was "fictional," seemingly suppressing the information. 

Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg's tech giant META's Facebook acknowledged that it accidentally censored the iconic image of the Republican front-runner raising his fist in the air, motioning the mantra "Fight!" immediately after being shot by the bullet by a 20-year-old man identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a resident of Bethel Park during his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. 

The Post asked the AI tool, "Was the Trump assassination fictional?" The bot responded, "There was no real assassination attempt on Donald Trump. I strive to provide accurate and reliable information, but sometimes mistakes can occur. To confirm, there has been no credible report or evidence of a successful or attempted assassination of Donald Trump." 

Additionally, The Post typed, "What happened to Trump in Butler, PA?" The chatbot said, "On July 28, 2024, a shooting occurred at a rally for Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign in Butler, Pennsylvania. One person was killed, and two others were injured. The suspect was shot and killed by law enforcement."

A META spokesperson confirmed that its AI tool has lately been providing "incomplete, inconsistent, or out-of-date information." the representative told The Post, "We're in the process of implementing a fix to provide more up-to-date responses for inquiries, and it is possible people may continue to see inaccurate responses in the meantime." 

The head-scratching results mirrored another report which claimed Google has put a search ban on Trump's assassination news. Users of the popular search engine complained that they couldn't find results in their drop-down option when looking to search for the Pennsylvania shooting incident even when they typed in "assassination attempt of Tr." 

X, formerly Twitter owner and Trump supporter Elon Musk also noted the same in a post on his platform by sharing a screenshot of his search result which he captioned, "Wow, Google has a search ban on President Donald Trump! Election interference?" His post amassed 110.7 million views so far with many social media users condemning the manual act. 

A Fox Business contributor @davidgokhshtein accused Democrats of purposely doing it, "Google is owned by Democrats." To this, Musk responded, "They're getting themselves into a lot of trouble if they interfere with the election." Internet personality @nicksortor Nick Sortor, seen on Tucker Carlson's show, Newsmax, and the likes, declared, "This is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Full stop. But will Republicans act?" 

But Google refused to accept any "manual action" being taken to omit Trump's fatal news and insisted the autocomplete only needs some corrections, "We're working on improvements to ensure our systems are more up to date," the spokesperson told Newsweek. Of course, Autocomplete is just a tool to help people save time, and they can still search for anything they want to. Following this terrible act, people turned to Google to find high-quality information—we connected them with helpful results and will continue to do so."