Facebook, YouTube Caught Red-Handed Amplifying, Profiting From Election Conspiracies
“These disturbing reports make it abundantly clear: social media companies, like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and X, are in league with right wing election deniers and profiting from their voter suppression tactics. This is a five-alarm fire for our democracy and exposes that tech CEOs have been lying to Congress, as recently as last month, about their ability and willingness to protect our elections. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle need to wake up: Big Tech regularly acts contrary to U.S. interests, and is in fact willing to sell our country up the river to make a buck.” – Sacha Haworth, Executive Director of The Tech Oversight Project
NYT – Election Falsehoods Take Off on YouTube as It Looks the Other Way (10/31/24)
“30 conservative channels posted 286 videos containing election misinformation, which racked up more than 47 million views. YouTube generated revenue from more than a third of those videos by placing ads before or during them, researchers found. Some commentators also made money from those videos and other monetized features available to members of the YouTube Partner Program.”
“YouTube’s approach to the presidential race garnered attention in September when two Russians, working for the state-run media outlet RT, were indicted in connection with an effort to spread disinformation on the video platform. RT allegedly funneled the money through Tenet Media, which operated a YouTube channel with more than 16 million views.”
“When YouTube last barred creators from uploading misinformation about the presidential election, the platform said it worried the content would mislead users. Since then, the company’s public stance has shifted. It said banning this type of election misinformation did not reduce real-world harm and has focused instead on its benefits. ‘What’s important to us,’ Ms. Coe, the YouTube executive, said, ‘is that we’re representing a broad spectrum of views.’”
ProPublica – Exploiting Meta’s Weaknesses, Deceptive Political Ads Thrived on Facebook and Instagram in Run-Up to Election (10/31/24)
“Eight deceptive Meta advertising operations … collectively controlled more than 340 Facebook pages, as well as associated Instagram and Messenger accounts … The networks have placed more than 160,000 election and social issues ads on these pages in English and Spanish. Meta showed the ads to users nearly 900 million times across Facebook and Instagram.”
“The networks collectively rank as the 11th-largest all-time advertiser on Meta for U.S. elections or social issues ads since the company began sharing data in 2018. The company’s failure to block these scams consistently highlights how one of the world’s largest platforms struggles to protect its users from fraud and deliver on its nearly decadelong promise to prevent deceptive political ads.”
“The ads run by the networks employ tactics that Meta has banned, including the undisclosed use of deepfake audio and video of national political figures and promoting misleading claims about government programs to bait people into sharing personal information … More than 13,000 ads deployed divisive political rhetoric or false claims to promote unofficial Trump merchandise.”
“In 2022 and 2023, Meta laid off over 20,000 employees, including members of its integrity team … It declined to say whether it has more people working on election ad reviews this cycle compared with the last presidential election … Meta also consistently failed to detect and remove copies of ads it had previously banned due to policy violations.”
WIRED – Ahead of the Election, Social Media Platforms Have Given Up (10/31/24)
“These fissures in platforms have happened across the board. Last year, Alphabet, Meta, and X reduced the size of their trust and safety teams and Meta completely abandoned a project building a new fact-checking tool as a result of cuts. Not only has Meta cast a blind eye to the militias currently organizing on its platforms, it is auto-generating militia-related groups.”
“Jim Jordan was elevated to chair of the powerful House Judiciary Committee and immediately launched investigations stifling the work of academics at best and launching harassment campaigns against entire moderation teams at worst … Now, much of the social media infrastructure built to protect our democratic systems in the months and days after the deadly riot has collapsed—either by inattention or force.”
“If you thought 2020 was bad, all of these decisions have led to an internet that’s worse off than in prior elections.The same bad actors are using the same playbook as before, but the tools to address it have disappeared.”