Rep. Matt Gaetz is launching an investigation into whether the Biden administration was involved in the “deletion” of social media photos of former President Donald Trump after he was shot at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the Florida Republican asked whether the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was involved in any discussions about the results of the search following the assassination attempt.
On July 13, gunman Thomas Crooks opened fire on Trump as he spoke on stage at a rally. One attendee, Corey Comperatore, was killed and two others were seriously injured. A bullet grazed Trump’s ear, drawing blood, before he was taken down by Secret Service.
“Given your department’s vested interest in keeping this story secret and your department’s history of pressuring tech organizations to censor, please provide my office with the following information by August 16, 2024,” Gaetz wrote in his letter.
The agency requested 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 comments about it.
Rep. Matt Gaetz is launching an investigation into whether the Biden administration was involved in the “deletion” of social media photos of former President Donald Trump after he was shot at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Trump slammed Facebook after an image of him covered in blood following an assassination attempt was mistakenly censored by the social media platform
This comes a day after Trump lashed out at Facebook and Google after Facebook admitted that an image of the former president after the assassination attempt was mistakenly censored by the social media platform.
“Facebook just admitted that it wrongly censored the Trump ‘assassination attempt’ photo and got caught,” the Republican presidential candidate posted on social media on Tuesday.
“The same goes for Google,” he said. “They have made it virtually impossible to find images or anything related to this heinous act. Both are facing a huge backlash from allegations of censorship.”
The Republican candidate argued that this was an attempt to manipulate the election and wrote in capital letters urging his supporters to “attack Meta and Google.”
Her post on Truth Social came after a member of Facebook’s communications team admitted that the image of Trump raising his fist in Butler, Pennsylvania, after the shooting was accidentally censored.
“This was a mistake,” Dani Lever wrote on X in response to a post accusing Mark Zuckerberg of censorship.
“This fact check was initially applied to a manipulated photo showing Secret Service agents smiling, and in some cases, our systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the actual photo,” he continued.
Lever said the issue had been fixed and Facebook apologized for the error.
Facebook communications team member says image was censored by mistake and apologizes for error
Trump’s truth: Social media post accusing Facebook and Google of censorship
Internet users have also raised questions about Google in recent days after searches for “Donald Trump” turned up articles about his political opponent in news results.
A search on DailyMail.com found Trump’s website, as well as Pages X and Facebook, and the images immediately appeared on the list.
But when it comes to top stories, the first articles listed were “Harris • Donald Trump,” followed by other categories of Trump-related articles.
Some internet users said their searches only showed news favoring Harris over Trump.
A Google search for Donald Trump on DailyMail.com found that news articles related to Harris appeared first, followed by articles related to the Secret Service in relation to Trump.
Google responded to the allegations in the story with an explanation on Monday.
“These labels are automatically generated based on common themes across many news articles and change over time,” the communications team wrote.
“A search for ‘Harris’ may result in a top news tag of ‘Harris • Donald Trump’ because news organizations often cover those terms together. You can see this happen across a variety of topics, including the Olympics, other public figures, businesses, and more,” they continued in a post on X.
Trump’s accusations are the latest in a series of accusations by conservatives who have been attacking the tech giant for election interference since 2008.
The son of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump Jr. also accused Google of election interference over the weekend in a post on X.
He forwarded a message from a user who pointed out that Googling the words “assassination attempt” showed auto-population options for Reagan, Bob Marley, Teddy Roosevelt and others, but had no auto-population suggestion for Trump.
Google said in a statement that 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 whatever they want.”
On Sunday, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) also questioned why Google is “suppressing search” about the attempted assassination of the former president.
He announced that he will conduct an official investigation into the matter at Google.
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