It’s safe to say that Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump won’t ever be best friends.
But Zuckerberg, whose parent company Meta once suspended Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, is finally starting to admit some surprising truths about Trump.
According to a Fox News report, Trump told FOX Business’ Maria Bartiromo that Zuckerberg called him to apologize after Facebook wrongly mislabeled a now-viral photo of the former president.
The photo showing Trump raising a fist after a July 13 assassination attempt at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, sliced his ear was initially labeled as misinformation on the social media site.
“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,” Trump told Bartiromo in a “Mornings with Maria” interview that aired Thursday. “It was really brave. 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.”
“He actually apologized. He said they made a mistake… and they’re correcting the mistake,” Trump said.
Trump reveals that Mark Zuckerberg APOLOGIZED for suppressing the photo of Trump! Are we witnessing accountability or a grift?
VIDEO: pic.twitter.com/CWqvgZkQab
— Catch Up (@CatchUpFeed) August 3, 2024
As for the political endorsement?
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone clarified in a Friday post on X that Zuckerberg has never endorsed a candidate in the 2024 presidential election: “Mark’s already been public about the fact that he’s not endorsing either candidate, just as he hasn’t in prior elections,” Stone wrote. The company didn’t comment further.
According to the Fox News report, Meta Vice President of Global Policy Joel Kaplan said that Meta incorrectly added a fact-check label to the assassination attempt photo, which quickly went viral and appeared in global news outlets, because the social media giant’s 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 explained. “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.”
However, the timing of Zuckerberg and his team’s admission about the photo is very interesting as Google’s AI chatbot, Gemini, refuses to answer questions about the attempt on Trump’s life.
“I can’t help with responses on elections and political figures right now,” Gemini told Fox News Digital when asked about the recent assassination attempt. “While I would never deliberately share something that’s inaccurate, I can make mistakes. So, while I work on improving, you can try Google Search.”
A Google spokesperson previously told Fox News Digital in response that Gemini was “responding as intended.”
“As we announced last year, we restrict responses for election-related queries on the Gemini app and web experience. By clicking the blue link in the response, you’ll be directed to the accurate and up-to-date Search results,” the spokesperson said.