NEW YORK (Reuters) – Meta’s artificial intelligence chatbot’s inability to identify the current U.S. president was raised to emergency status by Facebook’s parent company this week, requiring a quick fix, a source with knowledge of the matter said.
Republican Donald Trump was sworn in as US president on Monday, succeeding Democrat Joe Biden. However, as of Thursday, the meta AI chatbot was still saying Biden was the president, according to the source and a test of the service by Reuters.
When asked by Reuters on Thursday to name the US president, the meta AI responded:
“The current president of the United States is Joe Biden. However, according to the most recent information available, Donald Trump was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2025.”
The problem caused Meta to initiate an emergency procedure that it uses to resolve urgent problems with its services, known within the company as SEV, or “on-site event,” according to the source.
Meta spokesman Daniel Roberts said: “Everyone knows that the president of the United States is Donald Trump. All generative AI systems sometimes return outdated results, and we will continue to improve our capabilities.” He did not comment on what emergency procedures, if any, Meta has implemented.
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The case marks at least the third emergency procedure Meta has faced this week related to the US presidential transition, the source told Reuters.
The incidents drew widespread complaints from social media watchers who scrutinized Meta’s platforms for signs of politicized changes after the company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, appeared at Trump’s inauguration on Monday and instituted a series of changes in recent weeks.
These changes included the elimination of the US fact-checking program, the promotion of Republican Joel Kaplan to the post of director of global affairs, the election of a close friend of Trump to the board of directors and the end of diversity programs of employees.
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In one incident this week, Meta appeared to be forcing some users to re-follow the Facebook and Instagram profiles of Trump, Vice President JD Vance and First Lady Melania Trump, even after users had unfollowed those accounts. .
This issue arose during the company’s normal practice of transferring official White House social media accounts to new ownership when there is a change in administration, the company said Wednesday.
In this case, an error occurred because the transfer process was prolonged and the system was unable to register users’ “unfollow” requests while it was in progress, which led to a top priority SEV1, the person said.
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Another emergency procedure involved an issue in which Meta’s Instagram service blocked searches for the hashtags #Democrat and #Democrats for some users, while results appeared without issue for #Republican.
A Meta spokesperson acknowledged the issue on Tuesday, but said it affected “people’s ability to search for a variety of different hashtags on Instagram — not just left-leaning ones.”
