Meta said Tuesday that he has begun preparations for the midterm elections, including fighting white supremacist interference and planning to ban political ads in the final week before the November election.
Meta president Nick Clegg wrote that the social media titan has hundreds of people spread across 40 teams focused on the US mid-term. Mr Clegg is a former deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom and leader of the Liberal Democrats, who deals with Meta’s interactions with governments around the world.
“Our teams fight both foreign interference and domestic influence operations, and have exposed and disrupted dozens of networks that have attempted to interfere in US elections,” wrote Mr. Clegg on Meta’s blog. “We banned more than 270 white supremacist organizations and removed 2.5 million pieces of content linked to organized hate globally in the first quarter of 2022.”
Mr Clegg said his company is spending money on “proactive threat detection” and will expand its policies to address harassment and coordinated threats against election officials and poll workers.
Following its 2020 playbook, Meta is also planning to ban all new political, electoral and social ads in the final week before the 2022 election. Ads that have previously aired will continue to do so, but every Editing of existing ads will also be blocked.
“Our reasoning for this limitation period remains the same as in 2020: in the final days of the election, we recognize that there may not be enough time to challenge the new claims made in the ads,” Mr Clegg wrote. “This restriction period will be lifted the day after the election and we have no plans to extend it.”
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Mr Clegg said Meta is working with the Federal Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, state and local election officials and others in the private sector to ensure the technology company is prepared for the upcoming election.
