Several recent media investigations have found that false and misleading election ads are running rampant on Facebook just days out from the election, seemingly in violation of parent company Meta’s policies.
The findings largely come through searching the Meta Ad Library, a transparency tool that allows anyone to see who placed a given ad and roughly how much they paid Meta to run it. The company created the library after the 2016 election, when Facebook first got in hot water for allowing election misinformation to thrive on the platform.
The Washington Post and NPR reported this week that an Elon Musk-backed, pro-Donald Trump political group has been running ads deceptively designed to look like they’re from the Harris campaign. To Facebook users, the ads appear to be from a group called Progress 2028 ― a name that sounds like a left-wing answer to the right’s Project 2025.
In reality, the ads were placed by the Musk-bankrolled group Building America’s Future, and they imply several falsehoods about Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris’ policy plans. Among them are suggestions that she wants to allow undocumented immigrants to vote and enroll in Medicare, enforce mandatory gun buybacks and ban fracking ― none of which are true.
The group has spent more than $680,000 on ads since launching last month, with more than $350,000 spent last week. The ads have appeared to users millions of times across seven swing states, according to Meta’s data.
Meta did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s inquiries as to whether these ads violate the company’s election misinformation policies, but spokesperson Ryan Daniels defended running Musk’s ads to the Post.
“This type of political advertising isn’t new and has been found across the media landscape for decades,” he said, arguing that Meta’s transparency around ad buys “far exceeds that of any other platform where these ads have run.”
Musk, contacted through Tesla, did not immediately respond when asked if he was aware of these ads’ content. HuffPost also contacted X for comment.
Musk has spent tens of millions on getting Trump elected.
Another alarming finding comes from Forbes, which reported Thursday that Meta pulled in more than a million dollars running one buyer’s ads with election misinformation targeting the Harris campaign. Some of the ads, many of which ran in the past week, falsely claim that the upcoming election may be rigged or postponed by Democrats.
One of the ads, which features an apparently AI-generated rendering of Harris cheering as the American flag burn behind her, asks: “Was the 2024 presidential election just postponed? Click below to learn how the Harris-Walz campaign plans to use an 1866 law to block Trump from taking power even if he wins the election.” The ad warns this “could be the end of democracy as we know it.”
The ads appear on a page called The Tech Prophet owned by the Nevada-based Pro Health Digital LLC. Most of the ads link a to site run by fringe economist-turned-conspiracy theorist Jim Rickards, as Forbes first reported.
The “Audience” tab on that advertiser’s page, where information about spending and where the ads ran, was not present.
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Meta told Forbes it’s “reviewing the ads and will remove any that violate our policies.”
ProPublica also reported on the phenomenon Thursday, saying it had pinpointed eight deceptive Meta advertising operations that control more than 340 Facebook pages, at least some of which were hacked from public figures. The groups have posted more than 160,000 ads on election and social issues, the investigation found.
Some of the ads use deepfake video and audio from government officials ― a practice banned by Meta ― to ensnare users into sharing their private information, some of which is sold and used to con people out of their money, ProPublica found.