Facebook took more than $1 million for ads that saw election lies

Just six days before the 2024 presidential election, Facebook is running hundreds of ads from pages falsely claiming the upcoming election could be rigged or postponed. Facebook parent company Meta’s ad library shows that the sites behind the ads paid the company more than $1 million to run them. They were billed more than $350,000 for ads that ran in the past week.

One of the ads features a stylized image of Vice President Kamala Harris with devil horns and an American flag burning behind her. Other ads feature images of Harris and VP candidate Tim Walz interspersed with post-apocalyptic scenes, and images of Walz and President Biden interspersed with images of prescription drugs spilling out of bottles. One features an apparently AI-generated image of a smiling Harris in a hospital room preparing to give a screaming child an injection. Another features images of anti-vaxxer and third-party candidate RFK Jr. Some of the ads question whether Harris will remain in the race and suggest America is “heading for another civil war.”

Meta’s election rules prohibit posts that contain “misinformation about the dates, places, times, and methods of voting” and “misinformation about whether or not a candidate is running,” and its advertising rules prohibit ads that “question the legitimacy of a upcoming candidate or ongoing election.”

Many of the ads direct viewers to a page where they can purchase writings by Jim Rickards, a fringe economist turned conspiracy theorist and proponent of the New World Order conspiracy theory. Others direct people to a page that falsely claims that a ”’Uniparty” will win the election for Big Pharma.”

Meta spokesman Ryan Daniels said, “We review the ads and will remove any that violate our policies.” Rickards did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

Forbes identified the fake ads through the Meta Ad Library, a live repository of ads running on the company’s platforms that provides details about political advertisers and how much money they spend. Forbes did not find parallel ads in Google’s ad library. TikTok and X have ad libraries in Europe, where they are required by law, but keep their American advertisers — and their ad spending — secret. (In a previous life, I held content policy positions at Facebook and Spotify.)

Meta has a fraught history of election misinformation. In 2016, Russia’s Internet Research Agency used both ads and “organic” posts on Facebook to manipulate and divide American voters and steer them against the candidacy of Donald Trump. In 2020 it was Facebook and WhatsApp very used by disgruntled supporters of former President Trump to spread “stop steal” conspiracy theories and orchestrate the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.

Since 2021, Meta has dramatically reduced the amount of political posts it serves to users — which could increase the power of paid political ads to reach Facebook users with a candidate or party’s message. This year, Vice President Kamala Harris has used dramatically former President Donald Trump on Facebook ads.

In 2020, Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated more than $400 million to nonpartisan election integrity groups, including the Center for Election Innovation and Research and the Center for Tech and Civic Life. The groups are focused on improving the electoral infrastructure and do not support candidates.

In 2024, a publishing house founded by Donald Trump Jr. and MAGA influencer Sergio Gor started selling a coffee table book authored by Trump, who alleged that Zuckerberg had plotted against him in 2020. The book said of Zuckerberg: “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time, he will spend the rest of his life in prison. ” So has Trump called Zuckerberg an “enemy of the people” and said that his newfound opposition to a ban on TikTok (which he first tried to ban in 2020) stems from his desire to stop Meta from becoming more powerful.

Zuckerberg doesn’t appear to have continued his election integrity pledge in 2024. He did though calls Trump a “badass” after the former president survived an assassination attempt in July. Trump claimed Zuckerberg called him and told him he “couldn’t vote for a Democrat” in the upcoming election. Meta did not deny the call, but said Zuckerberg had not said anything about how he would vote.

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