As Meta’s oversight board reviews the company’s content moderation policies and enforcement practices regarding election-related misinformation, Media Matters urges Meta to strengthen its content moderation processes during the 2024 election cycle. We submitted public comments calling for stronger enforcement.
Meta has a responsibility to protect users from misinformation about elections and voter fraud, but the company has repeatedly failed to stop the spread of election misinformation on its platform. Notably, Meta failed to stop election misinformation before, during, and after the 2020 election. Additionally, after the deadly riots on January 6, 2021, the ban on “Stop the Steal” content could not be adequately enforced due to the narrow scope of the ban. The company also failed to stop the spread of election-related misinformation during Brazil’s 2022 presidential election, which led to a coup attempt by far-right extremists.
The Board has been involved in two lawsuits relating to Meta’s content decisions regarding Facebook posts that misrepresented information from the Australian Electoral Commission in the run-up to the referendum, as well as widespread election misinformation on Meta’s platform. As we consider the damage, we should keep in mind that it includes threats to democratic institutions and false information. Information regarding election integrity has become an international issue.
New data from Media Matters shows election misinformation on Facebook remains a dangerous problem. From January 1, 2022 to February 12, 2024, right-wing Facebook pages that regularly post about U.S. news and politics used election fraud-related keywords in at least 6,507 posts, totaling at least A total of 6,626,042 interactions were obtained.
The post with election fraud-related keywords from right-leaning pages that received the most total interactions was by Ben Shapiro, editor emeritus of the Daily Wire. In that post, Shapiro promoted election denier Dinesh D’Souza’s “documentary” exposing election fraud2000 mule. The post received at least 124,000 likes, he received 10,000 comments, and was shared at least 17,000 times. Facebook labeled the post as containing “partially false information.”
Read Media Matters’ full public comments here:
Media Matters for America P… by Media Matters for America
