Bartiromo asked Trump about the recent kerfuffle at Facebook, where photos of Trump post assassination attempt, with face bloodied and fist raised, were censored amid claims that the photo had been altered. This stemmed from the circulation of an altered image of the photo, the original of which had been taken by an AP reporter. In the wake of that circulation, all posts of the photos were censored by Facebook, not just the altered ones.
“I was called by Mark Zuckerberg,” he said, “yesterday, the day before, on this same subject. And h actually apologized, he said he made a mistake. On Google, no one called from Google.” Google had suppressed search results on the assassination attempt.
“Google has been very bad,” he went on to say, “they’ve been very irresponsible. And I have a feeling that Google’s going to be close to shut down, because I don’t think Congress is going to take it. I really don’t think so. Google has to be careful.”
As for Zuckerberg, Trump said “I believe Mark Zuckerberg, he called me a lot, they are working on it, and I think they fixed it, and he’s not doing what he did four years ago with the $500 million.”
Zuckerberg recently said that he thought Trump was “badass” for getting back up after being shot in the face.
While he said he would not be endorsing either political candidate, he also said that he would not be leaning in to support Democrats as he had done in the past. In 2020, Facebook suppressed reporting on Joe Biden’s ties to his son’s shady business dealings. It was later revealed through polling that many Americans would not have cast their votes for Biden had they known about the overseas influence peddling rampant within the Biden family.
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Trump added that the two have spoken several times since that conversation. “So Mark Zuckerberg called me. First of all, he called me a couple of times. He called me after the event and he said, ‘That was really great, that was really brave,’” Trump told Bartiromo. “And he even announced that he wouldn’t support a Democrat because he couldn’t, because he respected me for what I did that day.”
Trump subsequently said that during their conversations, Zuckerberg apologized for Facebook and Instagram censoring a photo of Trump taken immediately after the July 13 shooting. Meta spokesperson Dani Lever acknowledged the erroneous censorship in a post on X. “This was an error,” Lever wrote. “This fact check was initially applied to a manipulated photo of 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 error.” A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on a conversation between Trump and Zuckerberg, but did not deny that they had spoken. The spokesperson also referred Business Insider to Zuckerberg’s statement last month that he would not endorse any presidential candidates this year. Trump also accused Google of censoring content about him, saying that when users searched for “assassination attempt,” his name did not automatically appear in the search.
Trump told Bartiromo that Google never called him to apologize. “Google has been very bad,” Trump told Bartiromo. “They’ve been very irresponsible and I feel like Google is about to be shut down because I don’t think Congress is going to accept it. I really don’t think so. Google has to be careful.”
In a post on Truth Social on Tuesday, Trump claimed that Google had made it “virtually impossible to find images or anything else about this heinous act.” He continued: “Here we go again, another attempt to rig the election!!! GET AFTER META AND GOOGLE. LET THEM KNOW WE ARE ALL WISE, THIS TIME WE WILL BE MUCH HARDER.”
Google responded to the allegations in a post on X, writing that its internal system “did not provide predictions for searches about the assassination attempt” because it had “built-in protections against political violence” that were outdated.
