August 16, 2022 – Facebook has yet again failed to detect election disinformation in advertisements submitted to the platform, this time ahead of the 2022 elections in Brazil, a report by UK-based non-profit Global Witness has revealed.
“Facebook has identified Brazil as one of its priority countries where it’s investing special resources specifically to tackle election-related disinformation,” said Jon Lloyd, senior adviser at Global Witness. “So we wanted to really test out their systems with enough time for them to act. And with the US midterms around the corner, Meta simply has to get this right – and right now.”
According to the rights group, 10 ads in Brazilian Portuguese were submitted to Facebook, five containing false information such as wrong date and voting methods, and the other five seeking to delegitimise the electoral process by questioning the integrity of Brazil’s electronic voting system. Facebook failed to catch the disinformation in the ads which could “stop people from voting” and “alarmingly” approved all 10 of them, hence violating its own election ad policies.
“We submitted the election disinformation in the form of ads, as this enables us to remove them before they go live, while still being reviewed by Facebook and undergoing Facebook’s content moderation process,” said Global Witness. “According to Facebook, this often includes proactive review using automated and manual tools. Facebook lauds its own system for reviewing ads with advertisers being held to an ‘even stricter’ standard.”
In response to the findings, a spokesperson from Facebook’s parent company Meta said that they “are and have been deeply committed to protecting election integrity in Brazil and around the world”.
This is the fourth time that Facebook has failed Global Witness’ test. In the previous three tests, it submitted ads containing violent hate speech against ethnic groups in Ethiopia, the Rohingya people in Myanmar, and vulnerable groups in Kenya. All of these ads were approved for publication as well.
Meta’s ineffective content moderation has repeatedly raised concerns and questions as to how the tech corporation is handling hate speech and misinformation across its platforms. The 2021 Facebook Papers revealed that Facebook struggles with non-English languages, which leaves the platform vulnerable to abuse and hate speech, especially in the Global South. About 87 percent of the company’s global budget on classifying misinformation was allocated for the US, while the rest of the world received the remaining 13 percent of it.
