Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents at a campaign rally, Saturday, July 13, in Butler, Pa. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Facebook has finally admitted it censored former President Donald Trump’s defiant response to a would-be assassin’s bullet.

A post on the social media site of Trump raising his fist right after being shot was initially flagged as misinformation, according to multiple reports.

That was a mistake, Facebook’s parent Meta said.

“Yes, this was an error,” Dani Lever of Meta wrote on X in response to conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, who had called out Facebook for not allowing users to share the photo, the New York Post reported.

Lever continues by posting: “This fact check was initially applied to a doctored photo showing the secret service agents smiling, and in some cases our systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the real photo. This has been fixed and we apologize for the mistake.”

The error comes as Meta is coming under intense scrutiny for a pivot to artificial intelligence as it attempts to police what is shared online.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta, writes in a blog post that his company is “taking the next steps towards open source AI becoming the industry standard.”

This hits as Elon Musk shared a video using an AI voice-cloning tool to mimic the voice of Vice President Kamala Harris saying things not attributed to her, the Associated Press writes.

It’s all a tangled web that shows social media is not the most reliable venue for legitimate news, said social media expert David Gerzof Richard, a professor at Emerson College and founder of Big Fish PR.

“It seems we haven’t learned our lesson,” he told the Herald Monday, referring to all the misinformation surrounding the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. “Fact checking is the first thing that goes out the window.”

He said news consumers make the mistake of believing Facebook and X, formerly Twitter, are legitimate news sources.

“Certain brands on those sites have established themselves as getting it right,” he added, and more importantly admitting when they are wrong.

“It’s so hard to police a platform like X or Facebook,” he said, “they just don’t have the same level of journalism ethics.”

Meta has posted that it is working with “industry partners on common technical standards for identifying AI content, including video and audio. In the coming months, we will label images that users post to Facebook, Instagram and Threads when we can detect industry standard indicators that they are AI-generated.”

With its outsized influence on elections and more, critics say that’s a drop in the bucket.

The Meta goes on to state “as the difference between human and synthetic content gets blurred, people want to know where the boundary lies. People are often coming across AI-generated content for the first time and our users have told us they appreciate transparency around this new technology.”