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