Facebook apologizes for fact-checking Trump assassination photo

Meta, the company behind Facebook, has apologized for removing a photo of former President Donald Trump shortly after he was shot in the ear at a Pennsylvania campaign rally earlier this month.

Shortly after some right-wing social media accounts complained that Facebook was preventing them from sharing a photo of Trump in the wake of the shooting, Facebook spokesperson Dani Lever took to Twitter to explain that the image should not have been censored.

"This was an error," Lever wrote. "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."

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Some MAGA conspiracy theorists have been pushing a fake photo featuring Secret Service agents smiling in order to push baseless claims that the Secret Service was in on the assassination plot against the former president.

As Fox Baltimore reports, "Meta uses a third-party fact-checking system due to its belief that a private company like itself shouldn't be 'deciding what’s true or false.' The system is used to identify misinformation, which Meta takes into consideration when taking action against inaccurate content."