Facebook Tightens Moderation Policies to ‘Safeguard’ 2022 Midterms

Facebook will prevent edits to ads dealing with social, political, or electoral issues that are approved to run in the week of the midterm elections, among a number of steps it is taking to build on and expand what it calls its 2020 election “safeguards” ahead of the midterms.

In a press release written by Facebook (now known as Meta) Global Affairs President Nick Clegg, the tech company which remains a pivotal force in disseminating news to Americans boasted of its efforts to “protect elections online,” not just in the United States but around the world.

Via Facebook:

Meta invests a huge amount to protect elections online — not just during election periods but at all times. We spent approximately $5 billion on safety and security last year alone, and have hundreds of people dedicated to this work permanently embedded across more than 40 teams. With each major election around the world — including national elections this year in France and the Philippines — we incorporate the lessons we learn to help stay ahead of emerging threats.

Facebook said it would remove posts that encourage people not to vote, or question the legitimacy of the midterm elections, as well as “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.”

The company also boasted of the vast amounts of content it has censored in the name of fighting “hate,” a nebulous term that is frequently used by various private actors to suppress legitimate political discourse.

Our teams fight both foreign interference and domestic influence operations, and have exposed and disrupted dozens of networks that have attempted to interfere with US elections. We’ve 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. Of the content we removed, nearly 97% of it was found by our systems before someone reported it.

The fact that Facebook’s systems detected “hate” content automatically, without users’ input, falls in with the agenda of the World Economic Forum, which is pushing companies to adopt more sophisticated techniques of automated, AI-powered censorship.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.