Rep. Matt Gaetz is launching a probe into whether the Biden administration participated in social media ‘erasure’ of the photos of former President Donald Trump after he was shot at in his Butler, Pa. rally.
In a letter to Homeland Security Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas the Florida Republican asked whether the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) participated in any discussions of search results after the assassination attempt.
On July 13 gunman Thomas Crooks opened fire toward Trump while he was speaking on stage at a rally. One attendee, Corey Comperatore, was killed and two others were critically injured. A bullet grazed Trump’s ear, drawing blood, before he was tackled by Secret Service.
‘Given your department’s self-interest in keeping this story under wraps and your department’s history of strong-arming tech organizations to censor, please provide my office with the following information by August 16, 2024,’ Gaetz wrote in his letter.
He asked for all communications between DHS and social media executives from July 13 to July 31 that were related to the shooting as well as communications between DHS and government employees related to online commentary about it.
Rep. Matt Gaetz is launching a probe into whether the Biden administration participated in social media ‘erasure’ of the photos of former President Donald Trump after he was shot at in his Butler, Pa. rally
Trump slammed Facebook after image of him covered in blood following assassination attempt was mistakenly censored by the social media platform
It comes one day after Trump lashed out at Facebook and Google after Facebook admitted an image of the ex-president following the assassination attempt was mistakenly censored by the social media platform.
‘Facebook has just admitted that it wrongly censored the Trump “attempted assassination photo,” and got caught,’ the Republican presidential nominee posted on social media on Tuesday.
‘Same thing for Google,’ he claimed. ‘They made it virtually impossible to find pictures or anything about this heinous act. Both are facing big backlash over censorship claims.’
The GOP nominee argued it was an attempt to rig the election and wrote in all caps urging his backers to ‘Go after Meta and Google.’
His post on Truth Social came after a member of Facebook’s communications team admitted the image of Trump raising his fist in Butler, Pennsylvania, after the shooting was accidentally censored.
‘This was an error,’ wrote Dani Lever on X in response to a post accusing Mark Zuckerberg of censorship.
‘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,’ she continued.
Lever said the issue had been fixed, and Facebook apologized for the mistake.
Member of Facebook’s communications team says image was censored in error and apologizes for mistake
Trump’s Truth Social post accusing Facebook and Google of censorship
Separately, internet users in the past few days have also raised questions about Google after searches of ‘Donald Trump’ brought up articles about his political opponent in the news results.
A search by DailyMail.com found Trump’s website, X and Facebook pages and images were immediately listed.
But when it came to top stories, the first articles listed were ‘Harris • Donald Trump’ followed by other categories of Trump related articles.
Some internet users claimed their searches only showed news that favored Harris over Trump.
A DailyMail.com search of Donald Trump in Google found Harris related news articles popped up first followed by Secret Service related articles in relation to Trump
Google responded to the news stories accusations with an explanation on Monday.
‘These labels are automatically generated based on common topics across many news articles, and they change over time,’ the communications team wrote.
‘A search for “Harris” might result in a “Harris • Donald Trump” Top Stories label because news orgs frequently cover those terms together. You can see this happening across a range of topics, like the Olympics, other public figures, companies and more,’ they continued in a post on X.
Trump’s allegations mark the latest in a series of accusation by conservatives who have been going after the tech giant accusing it of election interference dating as far back as 2008.
The GOP presidential nominee’s son Donald Trump Jr. also accused the Google of election interference over the weekend in a post on X.
He reposted a user who pointed out searching Google with the words ‘assassination attempt on’ showed auto population options for Reagan, Bob Marley, Teddy Roosevelt and others but did not have an auto population suggestion for Trump.
Google said in a statement it is ‘working on improvements to ensure our systems are more up to date.’
In a statement to the new York Post, the spokesperson also said ‘Autocomplete is just a tool to help people save time, and they can still search for anything they want to.’
On Sunday, Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) also questioned why Google is ‘suppressing the search’ about the assassination attempt on the ex-president.
He announced he would be making an official inquiry into Google on the matter.
