While Meta recently announced that Facebook and Instagram will require political ads to disclose if they were created using artificial intelligence, the company will allow political ads claiming the 2020 US presidential election was rigged in favor of President Joe Biden.
Meta additionally announced that while will allow political ads to claim that past elections, including the 2020 presidential race, were rigged, it is banning ads that “call into question the legitimacy of an upcoming or ongoing election.”
The policy, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal this week is actually part of a year-old policy update by Meta that hasn’t been widely reported.
Disputes over the legitimacy of the election have been ongoing mostly along party lines in the U.S.
Following the tumultuous election process in 2020, dozens of lawsuits at both the state and federal levels that sought to challenge the 2020 presidential election results were dismissed.
Meta is not alone in its stance on allowing election deniers a platform, YouTube said in June it would reverse its policy and “stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections.”
At the time YouTube said in a blog post. “In the current environment, we find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm.
