Democratic officials criticize Meta ad policy, saying it amplifies lies about 2020 election
ATLANTA– Several Democrats who serve as their states’ top election officials have sent a letter to Facebook’s parent company asking it to stop allowing ads claiming the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
In the letter addressed to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the secretaries of state of Colorado, Maine, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington and Vermont said allowing such ads will further erode trust in elections and increase the threat of will fuel political violence against election workers. which has already led to some leaving the profession. The letter was also signed by Wisconsin Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski, who does not oversee elections.
“Meta is allowing extremists and election deniers to further undermine our elections,” the secretaries wrote in the letter, which was emailed to the tech giant on Thursday. “As foreign ministers, we strongly oppose Meta’s decision to allow ads that promote election denial and urge you to withdraw this policy before it causes more damage.”
Nearly four years later, conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 election and false claims of widespread fraud and voting machine manipulation persist. Former President Donald Trump continues to insist, despite no evidence of widespread fraud, that he won the election as he seeks a return to the White House.
Reviews, recounts and audits in the swing states where he contested his loss have all confirmed Democrat Joe Biden’s victory, and even Trump’s former attorney general said there was no fraud on a scale that could have changed the election make it tilt. In an interview this week with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Trump falsely claimed he won Wisconsin despite losing Biden by about 21,000 votes. Trump told the news station that he would accept the results of the November election “if all is fair.”
Since the 2020 elections, election workers in parts of the country have faced death threats and intimidation. A recent survey by NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice found that 34% of local election officials said they were aware of one or more local election officials or election workers who had left their jobs at least partially due to security fears, threats or intimidation . The environment has led to historic turnover of election workers across the country.
YouTube, Google’s video service, announced a policy similar to Meta’s last year, saying it would stop removing content that falsely claimed that past U.S. presidential elections were tainted by fraud.
Meta has defended the work it does to protect elections worldwide. A company spokesperson provided details on how the company views elections, pointing to its plan for the 2022 midterm elections, in which the company said it will “continually review content to determine whether it violates our community standards, including our policies on elections and voter interference, speech, coordinating harm and publicizing crime, bullying and intimidation.”
As part of its work, Meta said it would remove election-related content that contains misinformation about the “dates, locations, times and methods of voting,” along with calls for violence related to voting or the outcome of elections. In that plan, the company specified that it would reject ads that questioned the legitimacy of upcoming or ongoing elections.
But it’s the ads related to the 2020 election that have the group of Democratic secretaries of state concerned, including several campaign ads earlier this year that repeated false claims that the election was rigged. The letter was drafted by the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, a political action committee affiliated with the Democratic National Committee, and distributed only to Democrats.
“If people think an election has been stolen, they are less likely to have confidence in the system, and that depresses turnout,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said in an interview Friday. “We want voters to know the truth about elections and feel empowered. to take part.”