Just six days before the 2024 presidential election, Facebook is running hundreds of ads from pages that falsely claim that the upcoming election may be rigged or postponed. Facebook parent company Meta’s ad library shows that the pages behind the ads have paid the company more than $1 million to run them. They racked up a bill of more than $350,000 for ads run in just 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 interposed with post-apocalyptic scenes, and pictures of Walz and President Biden mashed up 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 that America is “headed for another civil war.”
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Because Zuckerberg is actually one of the worst billionaires alive, but he doesn’t make (as much of) a spectacle of himself like Musk or Bezos, so people forget and keep using his products.
We don’t have people going “Stop using Facebook/Instagram/Threads! Why are you still using it!?” like we do the people who say the same about Xitter every time it comes up, because Musk is actively out here saying the quiet part out loud so people are more upset about that despite Xitter having less influence, realistically.
And Whatsapp. People seem dumbfounded whenever they find out Facebook owns it.
I’m over here going “Stop using Xitter/Facebook/Instagram/Threads! Why are you still using them!?” and “Join the fediverse!”
- Deceptive Political Ads: Eight deceptive advertising networks have placed over 160,000 election and social issues ads across more than 340 Facebook pages in English and Spanish.
- Harmed Users: Some of the people who clicked on ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges or lost health coverage, among other consequences.
- Spotty Enforcement: Meta removed some ads after first approving them, but it failed to catch others with similar or identical content — or to stop networks from launching new pages and ads.