In a letter addressed to Facebook Inc., many Democratic state election authorities have demanded that the social media giant remove ads that suggest the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent.
Colorado, Maine, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Vermont’s state secretaries wrote a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressing their concerns that approving these ads will exacerbate the erosion of public trust in elections and incite political violence against election workers, a problem that has already caused some to quit the field. Sarah Godlewski, the Wisconsin secretary of state, who is not responsible for overseeing elections, was also a signatory to the letter.
In a letter sent to the tech company on Thursday, the secretaries stated, “Meta is allowing extremists and election deniers to further undermine our elections.” “We are firmly against Meta’s decision to permit ads promoting election denialism and urge you to repeal this policy before it causes further harm. “—Secretaries of State
Even after all this time, rumors about the 2020 election and accusations of massive voting machine manipulation and fraud continue to circulate. Though there is no proof of extensive fraud, former president Donald Trump remains adamant that he was elected and is vying for a second term in office.
Even Trump’s former attorney general stated that there was no fraud of a magnitude that could have impacted the election, and reviews, recounts, and audits in the swing states where he challenged his defeat have all upheld Democratic Joe Biden’s triumph. Despite losing by around 21,000 votes to Biden, Trump falsely claimed victory in Wisconsin in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this week. According to Trump’s statement to the news outlet, “if everything’s honest,” he will accept the November election results.
Many election workers have been harassed and threatened with death since the 2020 election. According to a recent poll conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, 34% of local election officials were aware of someone who resigned from their position due to concerns about their safety, threats, or intimidation. There has been an unprecedented loss of election workers nationwide as a result of the current climate.
YouTube, which is owned by Google, followed Meta’s lead last year and said that it would no longer remove content that erroneously claimed that prior U.S. presidential elections were corrupted by fraud.
Meta has defended its efforts to safeguard elections around the world. In their 2022 midterm election plan, the company stated that they will “continuously review content to determine if it violates our community standards, including our policies on election and voter interference, hate speech, coordinating harm and publicizing crime, and bullying and harassment.” This statement was made by a company spokesperson who elaborated on the company’s stance on elections.
Meta has threatened to remove election-related content that incites violence or spreads false information regarding the “dates, locations, times and methods of voting” as part of its ongoing efforts to clean up the platform. As part of that strategy, the business promised to remove any advertisements that cast doubt on the validity of an impending or current election.
The group of Democratic state secretaries is worried about advertisements for the 2020 election, particularly those that rehash the same false allegations about election fraud that appeared in previous campaigns. A PAC associated with the DNC, the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, was responsible for organizing and disseminating the letter to other Democrats.
Shenna Bellows, secretary of state for Maine, said in an interview on Friday that voter turnout drops when people feel their vote was stolen because they lose faith in the system. “We aim for citizens to be informed about the election process and to have the confidence to cast their ballots.”