Democratic Groups Citing Election 'Disinformation' Already Pressuring Zuckerberg for Censorship on Meta Platforms
A coalition of left-leaning voter outreach groups has urged Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to begin censoring “disinformation” on the company’s platforms ahead of the 2024 elections.
The groups argued in a letter that Meta’s newest platform Threads should quickly adopt policies to remove speech that is at odds with official government lines on issues such as election integrity.
In a letter, Vote.org and 11 other groups complained that YouTube and Twitter had each dialed back policies that chilled free speech before, during and after the 2020 election.
Twitter owner Elon Musk has vowed to make his platform a haven for free speech while YouTube announced in May it would no longer remove certain posts.
“In the current environment, we find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm,” YouTube said.
The company added, “With that in mind, and with 2024 campaigns well underway, we will stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections.”
The one-dozen voter outreach groups urged Zuckerberg to continue censoring the speech of Americans and claimed a failure to do so could result in violence.
“As you know, both YouTube and Twitter have recently taken concrete steps to allow election disinformation to thrive on their platforms,” the letter read. “In the absence of strong protections for election integrity and for voters, we have seen real-world fallout, from the siege on the Capitol to a new swarm of voter suppression laws introduced in states around the country after the 2020 election.”
The letter did not specifically cite any law in any state that could disenfranchise voters.
One election integrity law implemented in Georgia in 2021 drew criticism for asking voters to prove their identities. The law was compared to policies of the Jim Crow era but resulted in high voter turnout last fall.
The letter continued, “As Threads builds its audience, it is incumbent that you make it clear that the platform will not be a place where baseless conspiracies and unverified reports are allowed to proliferate.”
The voter outreach groups concluded, ”Our democracy depends on it.”
The letter was signed by the organizations Vote.org; Cause Communications; End Citizens United; GAIN Power; Let America Vote Action Fund; NETWORK Lobby; No Business With Genocide; People Power United; Public Citizen; Public Wise; RepresentUs; and When We All Vote.
Threads, which was designed to become a competitor to Twitter, was unveiled last month and immediately began to censor conservatives on the platform.
The platform kicked off with tens of millions of cross-platform users who were automatically given accounts if they had an Instagram account.
Threads has since lost steam and its daily traffic has declined significantly, Market Watch reported.
Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan last summer that Facebook had censored users on behalf of the FBI.
Prior to the 2020 election, the company also prevented the sharing of news about the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop.
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