Zuckerberg's Meta Rolling Out 40 Teams to 'Protect' Midterm Elections by Disrupting Groups and Censoring Content
Facebook is rolling out its rules for the midterm elections in a post from Meta about how it plans to throw its weight around in the weeks leading up to the November midterm elections.
According to a post published last week from Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, 40 teams will be monitoring the elections.
The post cites one side of the forces allegedly trying to disrupt an election by noting that Meta has “banned more than 270 white supremacist organizations, and removed 2.5 million pieces of content tied to organized hate globally on Facebook in the first quarter of 2022.”
No specific mention was made about Facebook banning content from left-wing groups or their activities.
For the midterms, Clegg’s post said the company will employ “advanced security operations to fight foreign interference and domestic influence campaigns, our network of independent fact-checking partners, our industry-leading transparency measures around political advertising and pages, as well as new measures to help keep poll workers safe.”
“As we did in 2020, we have a dedicated team in place to combat election and voter interference while also helping people get reliable information about when and how to vote,” the post stated.
Big Tech is once again gearing up to censor whatever they consider to be “misleading narratives” ahead of the upcoming midterm elections. https://t.co/xDeQTbRQNQ
— NewsBusters (@newsbusters) August 17, 2022
Facebook will partner with the Biden administration as well, through an alliance with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, according to the post.
The company will also work with the National Association of Secretaries of State, which is led by Tahesha Way, the New Jersey secretary of state who was embroiled in a lawsuit with former President Donald Trump over the conduct of her state’s election s in 2020.
Another partner Facebook identified was the National Association of State Elections Directors, which is headed by Meagan Wolfe, Wisconsin’s Election Commission administrator.
In November 2021, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Wolfe faced calls from Wisconsin Republicans demanding that she step down after Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling accused the election commissioners of “committing felonies by telling election clerks to mail absentee ballots to nursing homes instead of visiting them in person during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“Two of the leading platforms responsible for censoring the New York Post‘s bombshell Hunter Biden scandal stories before the 2020…election are gearing up to censor free speech to combat so-called ‘misinformation’ ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.”https://t.co/WyoJ7AjUsy
— Internet Accountability Project (IAP) (@The_IAP) August 17, 2022
Clegg’s post stated that his company would do what it did in 2020, only more so.
“As was the case in the US in 2020, election-related content we will remove includes misinformation about the dates, locations, times, and methods of voting; misinformation about who can vote, whether a vote will be counted, and qualifications for voting; and calls for violence related to voting, voter registration, or the administration or outcome of an election. We will reject ads encouraging people not to vote or calling into question the legitimacy of the upcoming election,” the post said.
The post said Facebook will ban new ads, or ads previously published ads that contain significant changes, in the final week of the campaign.
“Our rationale for this restriction period remains the same as 2020: in the final days of an election, we recognize there may not be enough time to contest new claims made in ads. This restriction period will lift the day after the election and we have no plans to extend it,” the post said.
The announcement noted that Meta has 10 fact-checking partners, including USA Today, which at one point editorialized that “Donald Trump is unfit for the presidency.”
The others are: AFP – Hub; The Associated Press; Full Fact; Check Your Fact; The Dispatch; Factcheck.org; Lead Stories; PolitiFact; Science Feedback; and Reuters Fact Check
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