Facebook has issued an apology after censoring the famous image of Donald Trump raising his fist after surviving an assassination attempt.
According to social media reports, the image was labeled as having been “altered.”
Others received banners saying fact-checkers “reviewed a similar photo and said it was altered in a way that could mislead people.”
Facebook communications director Dani Lever said in a statement that the label was an “error.”
“This was an error. 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. This has been fixed and we apologize for the mistake,” Lever said.
Despite claiming the issue was fixed, the “altered photo/video” label on top of the iconic photo was not removed from Instagram.
“It has been nearly 3 hours since you tweeted ‘this has been fixed.’ While Facebook might be fixed, Instagram is still displaying the erroneous fact check. Do better @Meta,” another X post read.
Meta uses artificial intelligence to “scale the work of fact-checkers by applying warning labels to duplicates of false claims, and reducing their distribution,” according to an article from the company.
