Spanish.- Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network, interfered 39 times in US elections since 2008. In other words, if this social network were a person with a user profile, its “relationship status” with freedom of expression would say “it’s complicated”.
That’s the conclusion reached by researchers from the Free Speech America group at the Media Research Center (MRC) —dedicated to protecting online freedom of expression— after compiling events surrounding multiple instances of censorship on Facebook. So while Zuckerberg claims to be a defender of freedom of expression, on the other hand, he meddles in electoral processes, reaching its peak in 2020 when former President Donald Trump faced Joe Biden, who eventually emerged victorious.
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The report further clarifies how deeply Facebook has been involved in elections. It has so many precedents that summarizing them all is difficult. For example, strategies it applied to favor Biden before and after the last elections or how it harmed conservative media traffic. Its record is so extensive that this year it even applied a filter on Instagram (since this platform belongs to the Meta empire) so that its users do not see recommendations of political content.
Zuckerberg Exposed
During a speech at Georgetown University in 2019, Zuckerberg called political censorship “dangerous” and said that Facebook and other social media platforms should not act as “arbiters of truth”.
They were just empty words. According to the new report, “Facebook has vacillated between a ‘hands-off approach to online freedom of expression’ and repeated electoral interference through policy changes and outright censorship of candidates and political ideas”.
Findings are varied, such as in 2018 when it censored ads from Marsha Blackburn, then a Republican representative, and her colleague, Matt Rosendale. That same year, it silenced an ad promoting border security paid for by then-President Donald Trump. In 2022, it did the same with an ad about the “disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan” ordered by Biden.
However, the climax was when the social network limited the dissemination of the report on Hunter Biden published by the New York Post, which documented financial scandals of the presidential family.
More Censorship on Instagram
Several recommendations emerge after the findings, including the creation of a bipartisan commission within Facebook “to address the electoral interference and censorship issues described in the report”. But the question is, will Zuckerberg pay attention? What happens as the next presidential elections approach in November is that this time the entrepreneur has Congress’s eyes on his decisions, adding pressure to his next steps.
The new filter applied to political content “makes it harder for those producing it to grow their page and for more viewers to decide for themselves whether they want to follow that content,” warns the report.
Former President Trump, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, even Democratic Congresswoman Elizabeth Warren and current independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. were victims of Facebook censorship. That’s just part of the story in recent years, there’s still the rest of the electoral contest until November 5th.