Did Facebook censor the Trump San Jose rally? (Getty)
The Trump San Jose rally on June 2 was overcome with violence as
protesters threw eggs and bottles at supporters, destroyed barricades in
the nearby parking garage, and tore up the American flag. But something
else strange was happening at the same time. Facebook users reported
that they couldn’t search for the rally on Facebook.
Was this an example of Facebook censorship? At this point, we don’t
know if it was censorship that happened after the story went trending or
just some strange Facebook error. But the evidence has left Facebook
users confused and hoping to get answers.
Here’s what we know so far.
Searches for “Trump San Jose” and “Trump San Jose Rally” only turned up error messages, like this one on desktop:
(Facebook)
Users in different parts of the country reported the same thing
during the protests. One Facebook user in California found this when he
searched for “Trump San Jose” on mobile:
(Facebook)
And another user got this error:
(Facebook)
However, people had definitely been talking about the topic on
Facebook at some point, despite search results showing that no one was.
Before users hit “enter” when searching for the term, the following
appeared:
(Facebook)
Now people are wondering if this is a form of censorship occurring on
Facebook while the protests were ongoing. Censorship has been an
ongoing hot topic at Facebook. In early May,
Gizmodo published an article
where Facebook employees said they routinely suppressed stories that
were of interest to conservative readers, so they wouldn’t show up in
the trending section. And in late May, a Canadian commentator’s Facebook
account was temporarily banned after she posted about Trump. The ban
was later lifted,
Breitbart reported. Facebook itself
denied the allegation that
it censors conservative posts, and said they don’t do anything like
this. But now Facebook users are wondering if just such a thing happened
while the protests were ongoing during the Trump San Jose rally.
As an interesting comparison, the phrase “Trump riot” still worked
when used in search, as did “Trump rally” when the term “San Jose” was
not used with it.
The more specific phrase “San Jose Donald Trump rally protesters”
also worked … sort of. Despite showing it was trending for two hours, a
search of the phrase only showed one video of Trump speaking at his
rally. Beneath that one search result, the same error message “Sorry,
something went wrong” was displayed when the search was done on a
computer.
Here’s the search result showing the topic was trending:
(Facebook)
Now here are the results showing that under both “Latest” and “Top,” there were one and zero results, respectively:
Searching under “top,” just one result showed up before the error message. (Facebook)
And when searching under “Latest,” no results appeared, just like when searching for “Trump San Jose”:
(Facebook)
At this point, it’s not clear exactly what is happening with searches
related to Trump’s San Jose rally on Facebook. But users are wondering
if censorship was involved or if it was some strange technical glitch.
The next morning, some users were still reporting the same problems. It
wasn’t until many hours later that search results finally started
working again, long after the story might have ended up trending.
