In a letter to Facebook’s parent company, a number of Democrats holding prominent election positions in their states have requested that the firm prohibit advertisements suggesting that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.
The secretaries of state from Colorado, Maine, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Vermont wrote a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claiming that allowing such advertisements will further undermine public confidence in elections and encourage threats of political violence against election workers, which has already caused some to quit their jobs.
Sarah Godlewski, the secretary of state of Wisconsin, who is not in charge of elections, also signed the letter.
The letter was submitted to the tech company on Thursday and stated, “Meta is allowing extremists and election deniers to further undermine our elections. As Secretaries of State, we are strongly opposed to Meta’s decision to allow ads promoting election denialism and urge you to repeal this policy before it inflicts more damage.”
Conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and unfounded allegations of extensive fraud and voting system manipulation are still relevant, almost four years later. In an attempt to win back the White House, former President Donald Trump has persisted in saying he won that election even in the absence of any proof of widespread fraud.
Democrat Joe Biden’s victory has been confirmed by reviews, recounts, and audits in the swing states where Trump had contested his defeat. Even his former attorney general declared there was no significant fraud that could have influenced the outcome of the election.
This week, in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Trump misrepresented his victory in Wisconsin, saying he lost to Biden by roughly 21,000 votes. Trump informed the news organization that “if everything’s honest,” he will accept the election results in November.
Election workers have received death threats and other forms of intimidation in various sections of the nation since the 2020 election.
According to a recent poll conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, 34% of local election officials reported knowing of one or more election workers or officials who resigned from their positions due to intimidation, threats, or safety concerns.
Election workers around the nation are leaving their jobs at a historically high rate due to the environment.
The Google-owned video platform YouTube declared this year that it would no longer be eliminating content that made the erroneous assertion that prior U.S. presidential elections had been affected by fraud. This policy was similar to that of Meta.
Meta has defended the efforts it is making to safeguard elections around the world. Referring to its 2022 plan for the midterm elections, the company stated that it will “continually review content to determine if it violates our community standards, including our policies on election and voter interference, hate speech, coordinating harm and publicizing crime, and bullying and harassment,” a company spokesperson provided details about the company’s views on elections.
Election-related content that contains false information regarding the “dates, locations, times, and methods of voting” as well as calls for violence in connection with voting or election results would be removed by Meta as part of its efforts, the company stated.
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The business said in that strategy that it would not accept advertisements that questioned the veracity of an impending or ongoing election.
The group of Democratic secretaries of state, however, are more concerned about the 2020 election-related advertisements, such as the ones that repeated bogus allegations that the election was rigged earlier this year.
Distributed exclusively to Democrats, the letter was coordinated by the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, a DNC-affiliated political action organization.
“When people believe an election was stolen they are less likely to have confidence in the system, and that depresses turnout,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows stated. “We want voters to know the truth about elections and feel empowered to participate.”
