Rep. Matt Gaetz is launching an investigation into whether the Biden administration helped to “delete” photos of former President Donald Trump from social media after he was shot at at his rally in Butler, Pa.
In a letter to Homeland Security Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas, the Florida Republican asked whether the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had participated in discussions about search results after the assassination attempt.
On July 13, gunman Thomas Crooks opened fire on Trump as he was speaking onstage at a rally. One attendee, Corey Comperatore, was killed and two others were seriously wounded. A bullet grazed Trump’s ear, causing him to bleed before he was tackled by the Secret Service.
“Given your office’s self-interest in keeping this story secret and your office’s history of pressuring tech organizations to censor, I request that you provide my office with the following information by August 16, 2024,” Gaetz wrote in his letter.
He asked for all communications between DHS and social media executives between July 13 and July 31 related to the shooting, as well as communications between DHS and administration employees regarding online comments about it.
Rep. Matt Gaetz is launching an investigation into whether the Biden administration participated in the “erasure” of photos of former President Donald Trump from social media after he was shot at at his rally in Butler, Pa.
Trump criticized Facebook after a photo of him covered in blood after an assassination attempt was wrongly censored by the social media platform
The news comes a day after Trump launched a fierce attack on Facebook and Google after Facebook admitted that an image of the former president had been wrongly censored by the social media platform following the attempted assassination.
“Facebook just admitted it wrongly censored Trump’s ‘attempted assassination’ photo and got caught,” the Republican presidential candidate posted on social media on Tuesday.
“The same goes for Google,” he claimed. “They’ve made it virtually impossible to find photos or anything about this horrible act. Both are getting a lot of flack for claims of censorship.”
The Republican Party candidate alleged an attempt to rig the election and urged his supporters in all caps to “Take on Meta and Google.”
His post on Truth Social came after a member of Facebook’s communications team admitted that a photo of Trump raising his fist in Butler, Pennsylvania, after the shooting had been 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 that depicted the Secret Service agents smiling. In some cases, our systems incorrectly applied this fact check to the real photo,” she continued.
Lever reported that the issue had been resolved and Facebook apologized for the mistake.
Facebook communications team member says image was accidentally censored, apologizes for mistake
Trump’s Truth Social post accusing Facebook and Google of censorship
In addition, Internet users have also been asking questions about Google in recent days, after searches for “Donald Trump” returned articles about his political opponent in news results.
A search of DailyMail.com immediately returned Trump’s website, X and Facebook pages, with images also displayed.
But when it came to top stories, the first articles on the list were: “Harris • Donald Trump,” followed by other categories of articles about Trump.
Some Internet users claimed that their searches only returned news that favored Harris over Trump.
A Google search for Donald Trump on DailyMail.com first yielded Harris-related news articles, followed by Secret Service-related articles related to Trump
Google responded to the allegations in the news on Monday with an explanation.
“These labels are automatically generated based on common topics across many news articles, and they change over time,” the communications team wrote.
“A search for “Harris” may result in a “Harris • Donald Trump” Top Stories label because news organizations often treat these terms together. You see this happen across a wide range of topics, including the Olympics, other public figures, companies, and more,” they continued in a post on X.
Trump’s allegations are the latest in a string of accusations by conservatives who have accused the tech giant of election meddling since 2008.
The son of Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump Jr. also accused Google of election interference in a post on X over the weekend.
He reposted a post from a user who indicated that a Google search for the words “attack on” gave the option to auto-populate Reagan, Bob Marley, Teddy Roosevelt, and others, but that there were no suggestions for auto-populating Trump.
Google said in a statement that it is “working on improvements to ensure our systems are up to date.”
In a statement to the New York Post, the spokesperson also said, “Autofill is just a tool to save people time, and they can still search for whatever they want.”
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) also questioned Sunday why Google is “suppressing” searches for the attempted assassination of the former president.
He announced that he would launch an official investigation into the matter at Google.