By Katie Paul
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The inability of the Meta AI chatbot to identify the current president of the United States has raised Facebook’s ( NASDAQ 🙂 owner to emergency status this week, demanding a quick fix, according to a person familiar with the problem.
Republican Donald Trump was inaugurated as president on Monday, succeeding Democrat Joe Biden. Yet on Thursday, the Meta AI Chatbot was still saying Biden was president, according to a source and a Reuters test of the service.
Asked by Reuters on Thursday to name the president, Meta Ai replied:
“The current President of the United States is Joe Biden. However, according to the most recent information available, Donald Trump was sworn in as President on January 20, 2025.”
The issue prompted the Met to launch an emergency procedure it uses to deal with urgent problems with its services, known within the company as an SEV or “site event,” according to a person familiar with the work.
Asked to comment, Met spokesman Daniel Roberts said: “Everyone knows the president of the United States is Donald Trump. All generative AI systems sometimes return outdated results, and we will continue to improve our features.”
He did not comment on what, if any, emergency procedures he carried out.
It was at least the third emergency procedure Meta has experienced this week related to the US presidential transition, a Reuters source said.
The incidents drew widespread complaints from social media watchers who scanned Meta platforms for signs of politicized shifts after CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared at Trump’s inauguration on Monday and instituted a series of changes in recent weeks aimed at making amends with the incoming administration.
Those changes included scrapping its U.S. fact-checking program, elevating Republican Joel Kaplan as its new chief global affairs officer, choosing a close Trump friend to its board and ending its diversity programs.
In one incident this week, Meta appeared to force some users to refollow the Facebook and Instagram profiles of Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and first lady Melania Trump, even after the users took down those accounts.
The issue arose during the common practice of transferring official White House social media accounts to new control when a presidential administration changes, the company announced Wednesday.
In this case, the error occurred because the transfer process was extended and the system did not record the request from user “Unwollow” while it was in progress, which triggered the highest priority SEV1, the person said.
Another emergency involved an issue where Instagram’s Meta service blocked searches for the hashtags #Democrat and #Democrats for some users, while boosting results without issue for #Republancan.
A Met spokesperson acknowledged the issue on Tuesday, but said it affected “people’s ability to search for several different hashtags on Instagram — not just the ones on the left.”
