ANALYSIS: Facebook Has Interfered In U.S. Elections 39 Times Since 2008

A recent study conducted by the Media Research Center (MRC) found that Facebook has interfered with U.S. elections 39 times since 2008. The analysis found that Facebook has interfered with stories in every major election since 2012, with activity reaching new heights in 2020.

According to the study, Facebook’s election interference efforts really picked up in 2012 in the weeks leading up to the presidential election between Mitt Romney and Barrack Obama. Just a week prior to the election, Facebook suspended the account of Special Operations Speaks, a veteran-led PAC, for posting a meme that drew attention to the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

The meme included pictures of then-President Barrack Obama and Osama bin-Laden along with the words “Obama called on the SEALs and THEY got bin Laden. When the SEALs called on Obama THEY GOT DENIED,” Breitbart News reported at the time. Facebook removed the post, claiming that it had ““violate[d] Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.”

Things escalated in 2016, when Facebook censored then-Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and “conservative news” topics.

At the time, Facebook utilized a “trending” section that included news stories that were manually curated by contractors. Several of the curators told Gizmodo the articles that appeared in Facebook’s Trending News section often depended on the biases of the curator, as well as what Facebook wanted to spotlight at the time.

“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” one curator told the outlet. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”

Facebook’s algorithm flagged a number of pages belonging to then-presidential candidates, including Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

In 2018, Facebook censored or removed ads for a number of candidates running for national and state offices, including then-U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who went on to win a tightly contested Senate race. The platform also censored ads for U.S. Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT), and Michigan state Senate Republican candidate Aric Nesbitt.

The platform also censored an ad focusing on border policy from then-President Donald Trump, as well as an ad for an AR-15 giveaway from Senate candidate Austin Petersen (R-MO), who was hosting the event on his own website.

In 2020, the Media Research Center found that censorship on Facebook “exploded.”

“The platform censored posts and ads from then-sitting President Donald Trump at least four times and took down seven political ads paid for by the political right. One of these ad campaigns Facebook killed just over a month before the election,” the analysis found. The ad contrasted vast contradictions between harsh COVID-19 lockdown policies embraced by Democrats and the party’s open border policies.

Other candidates impacted by censorship included conservative journalist Laura Loomer, who ran for office in Florida, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). The analysis noted that censorship “came to a head” when the platform joined Twitter and other big tech outlets in censoring the bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story from the New York Post.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg later told Joe Rogan that the platform was pressured by intelligence agencies to censor the story. “The FBI basically came to us… and said, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert,” Zuckerberg said. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election and we have noticed that, basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that. So, just be vigilant.’”

The platform continued to censor conservative activists and politicians in 2022. The platform censored Rep. (then candidate) Rich McCormick (R-GA), Virginia GOP congressional candidate Jarome Bell, Tennessee GOP congressional candidate Robby Starbuck, and Missouri GOP U.S. Senate candidate Eric Greitens, the analysis found.

Facebook even suspended then-Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s Instagram account for posting a photo of a sign reading “Arizona for Arizonans.”

Ahead of the 2024 election, Facebook has been limiting access to “political content” among its userbase.  In February, Meta announced that Instagram and Threads announced that it would no longer be recommending political content to users by default.

“If you decide to follow accounts that post political content, we don’t want to get between you and their posts, but we also don’t want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow,” Instagram wrote in a blog post. “So we’re extending our existing approach to how we treat political content – we won’t proactively recommend content about politics on recommendation surfaces across Instagram and Threads.”

The Media Research Center notes that while the move may seem harmless, “it makes it more difficult for those who produce political content to grow their page and for more viewers to decide for themselves whether or not they want to follow that content.”

Facebook has also continued its censorship of political candidates, including pages belonging to presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.