House Republicans have included Meta, the parent company of facebook, in their investigation into online search platforms regarding the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. The main concern is whether government agencies pressured tech companies to suppress information about the shooting. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer wrote a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressing caution about executive branch officials influencing technology companies to remove or restrict newsworthy content.
Both Meta and Google faced scrutiny after users noticed irregularities in their platforms’ responses to the incident. While Google queries omitted references to Trump and instead showed news articles about Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, Meta’s AI chatbot claimed that the assassination attempt was fictional.
Earlier in August, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan sought an explanation from Google regarding errors in its search function. Now, Comer is requesting similar information from Meta, including all documents related to the design of its AI chatbot and internal policies governing its approach to harmful or dangerous search results.
Meta stated in a blog post that its chatbot was reprogrammed to avoid answering questions about the assassination attempt due to concerns over false information spreading. However, there were cases where incorrect answers were provided by Meta AI, including denying that the event occurred. The company acknowledged this issue and resolved it.
Additionally, Meta admitted that a fact-check label was mistakenly placed on an authentic photo of Trump after he was shot because their system confused it with a doctored version circulating on their platform.
Comer referenced these explanations but expressed ongoing concerns about speech suppression and censorship by technology and social media companies. He cited facebook’s suppression of a New York Post exposé on Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election as an example.
A spokesperson for Meta confirmed that they are working with the Oversight Committee to address their requests for information.
In another letter addressed to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Comer made similar requests for documents and information related to Google’s search function design and operation. This comes after committee staff received a briefing from Google’s legal counsel last week where they attributed search failures related to Trump to algorithmic issues and unspecified bugs.
The Epoch Times has reached out for comment from Google regarding these developments.