Why is Meta labelling Trump’s Real mug shot as a fake?

Click here to listen to an audio version of this post, read by the author.
I recently blogged about how Instagram was blocking a large list of hashtags specifically related to the American Democratic Party. Dozens of tags like #Democrat, #Biden, #Kamala, and #DNC were being censored, but Republican tags were not affected. Today I found another weird issue that I thought was worth documenting here.

Whenever users post Donald Trump’s booking photo from the Fulton County Jail, Meta adds a “fact check” beneath the post claiming the photo is “not real” and “made using AI”. I saw other users pointing this out, so I gave it a try too.

When I posted Trump’s mug shot on Threads, I got a notification saying a “fact check” had been added to my post. The note appeared under my post and said “see context added to this post”. When you clicked on the post you’d see a message saying, “Fact Check: Trump ‘Mug Shot’ Is NOT Real — It Was Made Using AI” along with a link to a site called Lead Stories. The story was written April of 2023, a few months before the real mug shot of Trump was taken. It is unrelated to my post and includes a totally different image than the one I shared.

youtu.be/NdDsnq1tAaw

I filed a “dispute” on the fact check and received a notification 20 minutes later that my dispute had been denied and the label would remain under my post.

My post was later shared by a few influential users on Threads, including someone who had recently been tagged in a post from Zuckerberg himself. And on the next morning, I found that the added context had been removed from my post with no explanation or notifications from Meta. It seems that my post’s visibility drew attention from someone at Meta, who removed the fact check from my specific post, but not from any others. As of this writing, the note still appears under a post by @TeddyHose.

The problem Persists:

To confirm this is still happening, I just shared Trump’s mug shot on Facebook and immediately got a notification that the image is still being incorrectly labelled by Meta’s moderation system. The Facebook notification specifies that my “post includes a photo that independent fact-checkers say was altered.” Other folks have confirmed this too, and I encourage you to try sharing Trump’s mug shot photo to see if it’s still happening too.

My thoughts:

Meta’s fact check on my post takes you to a link from early 2023 that includes a photo that looks totally different from the image that I shared. The article was accurate at the time it was written, but statements like “No credible outlet has published a police mugshot of Trump.” were no longer accurate a few months later.

It appears that Meta has a big database of images that always get flagged with a fact check. For some reason, an employee added Trump’s real mug shot to this database and connected that real photo with a real, but unrelated news article. Thus blurring the lines of what is and isn’t real on these platforms. It’s hard to understand how such a glaring error could take place and why it hasn’t been corrected in the past 18 months, but the end result is the same.

Again, the two photos look nothing alike, and Meta has had years to correct this. For added context, keep in mind this issue is happening

• 18 days after Zuckerberg said he was ending Meta’s fact-checking program
• During the first week of Trump’s second term
• Shortly after Meta was caught censoring all of the most popular hashtags related to Democrats on Instagram

Last year, Facebook also added incorrect labels on articles that were critical of Project 2025. Even if the article was accurate, Facebook added a message saying the articles were false and cited the Dispatch, a conservative fact-checking group, as their source.

Mark Zuckerberg claims that Meta shouldn’t be in the business of fact-checking and that community notes would be a better alternative. I’d say he’s right in this particular instance, but if you take these erroneous fact checks along with other recent incidents, like censoring all hashtags related to Democrats, I’d say Zuckerberg is really making a case for why we should be ditching Facebook, and using decentralized social media alternatives like Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Biden #Democrat #DNC #Kamala

Global Switch Day: How to Get Started with Mastodon

I recently wrote about some terrible big changes at Meta, like censoring all hashtags related to Democrats and falsely labeling unflattering photos of Trump as AI-generated fakes on Threads and Facebook. The issues don’t just stop at Zuck’s empire though. Since taking over Twitter, Elon Musk has blocked links to competitors, banned journalists, heavily censored words like “cisgender”, and manipulated the algorithm to match his personal views. Meanwhile the ban on TikTok, the other major social network, has been temporarily lifted but it’s unclear how long that will be the case and what major compromises the platform will make to avoid Trump’s scrutiny.

youtube.com/shorts/tyXNpFso23A

A better Social Web Is already Here:

If it’s not clear yet, now is the time to leave corporate social media behind. Luckily, there are plenty of decentralized alternatives like Pixelfed and Peertube. Today, I’ll walk you through getting started on Mastodon—an open-source, microblogging platform with a thriving community and some fantastic features.

• Community-Driven: no single company or user owns Mastodon
• No Ads, No Algorithms: Your feed is in your control, showing posts in chronological order without corporate interference.
• More Control: Edit your posts, set custom visibility, and use content warnings to shape your experience. It is 2025 y’all, how is “editing your post” still not a core feature of all social platforms?!
• Federated & Interconnected: Follow and engage with users across platforms like Pixelfed and Lemmy, all from Mastodon. Once you experience how amazing this is, you’ll never want to join another social platform that isn’t part of the fediverse.
• Decentralized & Resilient: No single entity can buy or shut it down. If Elon Musk bought a server, folks could switch to other servers without losing any followers.
• Great Vibes: After 17 years on Twitter, I thought finding a real alternative would be tough. But Mastodon’s community is thriving with artists, journalists, musicians, and even yo-yoers. There’s truly something for everyone… except Nazis.
• Stronger Privacy: No invasive tracking or data mining—your posts and interactions stay yours.
• Network effect: Mastodon is part of the open social web, powered by ActivityPub. With integrations across WordPress, Pixelfed, Flipboard, and even Threads (for limited ActivityPub support), the decentralized network keeps growing. Every day, new ActivityPub-powered tools and platforms expand this ecosystem. While Mastodon itself may not be the biggest social network, the broader fediverse creates a massive, interconnected space for online communities.

How to Get Started on Mastodon

1. Choose an Instance

This sounds confusing at first, but choosing an instance is no harder than picking which email client to use or where to host your website. Each Mastodon instance has its own rules, moderation style, and community vibe. Some are general-purpose, while others focus on specific interests like art, tech, or activism. You can browse and compare instances at joinmastodon.org or instances.social.

Don’t worry too much about what instance you join because you’ll still be able to interact with any other instances, and you can always bring your followers with you if you decide to move. I personally like Mastodon.social and would recommend it to new users.

2. Create Your Account

Picked your instance? Great, now sign up and create your profile. You’ll set up your username, add a bio, and upload a profile picture. Your handle will look a little bit like an email handle, with a username in the front and a server name in the back. For example, I’m @docpop

Please take a little time to flesh out your profile before diving into the next step. Whenever I see new followers, it’s nice to see they have bios and an avatar, otherwise I assume they are bots

3. Follow People and Explore

You’ll get the most out of it by following people and engaging with conversations. Mastodon’s “Federated Timeline” shows posts from across the network, and the “Local Timeline” shows posts from your server, but hashtags are a great way to find users around a topic that interests you. For instance #Caturday, #graffiti, #accessibility, and #IndieGames are tags that I like to explore. The search function helps you find users, hashtags, and posts.

4. Post and Engage

Whenver I hear complaints about Mastodon, it’s usually from users who sign up and never posted anything. The best way to find a community and get used to Mastodon is by actively posting. Posts on Mastodon are called “toots”, but you can call them whatever the heck you want. Posts can be up to 500 characters long (or more, depending on the instance). You can boost (like retweeting), reply, and favorite posts. There’s also built-in content warnings and post visibility settings, giving you more control over who sees your posts. For instance, you can set a toot to only be seen by your followers, by people specifically mentioned, or by people on your server.

I set all of my posts to public, but I know social media is different for each person. There’s no right or wrong way to share your posts on Mastodon.

5. Customize Your Experience

The easiest way to use Mastodon is through an app. The default Mastodon app is great and available on most devices. Personally, I like to use Ivory for iOS and Mac. OpenVibe is an awesome tool that allows you to post to multiple platforms (like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads) and see your feed all in one place. OpenVibe is free, open source, and cross-platform.

The biggest advantage of using an app is that you’ll never have to think about signing into different servers. If you are using Mastodon on the web, you might occasionally find yourself on another server, which is basically like being on another website. It can feel disconnected at first, but there are really cool tools like Graze (for Chrome or Firefox), which makes all these different websites feel interconnected. I highly recommend it!

6. Spread the word

Now that you are on the fediverse, it’s time to bring your friends here too. Social is always more fun with folks you know. Remember, if your friends still join another federated platform, like Pixelfed, you can still follow each other. You can spread the word by sharing a link to your profile, sending them a link to this post, or by sharing any of the great youtube videos on the subject with them. I highly recommend @JenJen@mastodon.art‘s guide to Mastodon for artists!

youtube.com/watch?v=deZwO9ezGl…

Have fun!

I love Mastodon, but I remember how confusing it seemed at first. “Servers”, “federation”, and “decentralization” all seemed too complex at first, but these days I don’t even think of them. Plus I can see how these tools make open social web much better than silo’d platforms like X or Instagram.

It reminds me of podcasts, which are powered by RSS and downloadable on any podcasting app. These days everyone understands podcasts, without needing to think about RSS and the open protocols that enable it. In a few years, the fediverse will be as commonly understood as podcasts, email, or the internet.

Today is a great day to take the plunge; try it out, find your community, and experience a healthy new form of social media! Have questions? Drop them in the comments or find me on Mastodon at @[url=https://mastodon.social/@docpop]docpop@mastodon.social[/url]! I’d be glad to help out in any way that I can, but I don’t want to hear complaints about the fediverse if you haven’t been posting, following, boosting, and engaging yet.

youtube.com/watch?v=QzYozbNneV…

#accessibility #BoardGames #Caturday #graffiti #IndieGames

doc

2025-01-27 05:38:21

Why is Meta labelling Trump’s Real mug shot as a fake?

Click here to listen to an audio version of this post, read by the author.
I recently blogged about how Instagram was blocking a large list of hashtags specifically related to the American Democratic Party. Dozens of tags like #Democrat, #Biden, #Kamala, and #DNC were being censored, but Republican tags were not affected. Today I found another weird issue that I thought was worth documenting here.

Whenever users post Donald Trump’s booking photo from the Fulton County Jail, Meta adds a “fact check” beneath the post claiming the photo is “not real” and “made using AI”. I saw other users pointing this out, so I gave it a try too.

When I posted Trump’s mug shot on Threads, I got a notification saying a “fact check” had been added to my post. The note appeared under my post and said “see context added to this post”. When you clicked on the post you’d see a message saying, “Fact Check: Trump ‘Mug Shot’ Is NOT Real — It Was Made Using AI” along with a link to a site called Lead Stories. The story was written April of 2023, a few months before the real mug shot of Trump was taken. It is unrelated to my post and includes a totally different image than the one I shared.

youtu.be/NdDsnq1tAaw

I filed a “dispute” on the fact check and received a notification 20 minutes later that my dispute had been denied and the label would remain under my post.

My post was later shared by a few influential users on Threads, including someone who had recently been tagged in a post from Zuckerberg himself. And on the next morning, I found that the added context had been removed from my post with no explanation or notifications from Meta. It seems that my post’s visibility drew attention from someone at Meta, who removed the fact check from my specific post, but not from any others. As of this writing, the note still appears under a post by @TeddyHose.

The problem Persists:

To confirm this is still happening, I just shared Trump’s mug shot on Facebook and immediately got a notification that the image is still being incorrectly labelled by Meta’s moderation system. The Facebook notification specifies that my “post includes a photo that independent fact-checkers say was altered.” Other folks have confirmed this too, and I encourage you to try sharing Trump’s mug shot photo to see if it’s still happening too.

My thoughts:

Meta’s fact check on my post takes you to a link from early 2023 that includes a photo that looks totally different from the image that I shared. The article was accurate at the time it was written, but statements like “No credible outlet has published a police mugshot of Trump.” were no longer accurate a few months later.

It appears that Meta has a big database of images that always get flagged with a fact check. For some reason, an employee added Trump’s real mug shot to this database and connected that real photo with a real, but unrelated news article. Thus blurring the lines of what is and isn’t real on these platforms. It’s hard to understand how such a glaring error could take place and why it hasn’t been corrected in the past 18 months, but the end result is the same.

Again, the two photos look nothing alike, and Meta has had years to correct this. For added context, keep in mind this issue is happening

• 18 days after Zuckerberg said he was ending Meta’s fact-checking program
• During the first week of Trump’s second term
• Shortly after Meta was caught censoring all of the most popular hashtags related to Democrats on Instagram

Last year, Facebook also added incorrect labels on articles that were critical of Project 2025. Even if the article was accurate, Facebook added a message saying the articles were false and cited the Dispatch, a conservative fact-checking group, as their source.

Mark Zuckerberg claims that Meta shouldn’t be in the business of fact-checking and that community notes would be a better alternative. I’d say he’s right in this particular instance, but if you take these erroneous fact checks along with other recent incidents, like censoring all hashtags related to Democrats, I’d say Zuckerberg is really making a case for why we should be ditching Facebook, and using decentralized social media alternatives like Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Biden #Democrat #DNC #Kamala

2023 mugshot of former US president Donald J. Trump

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