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Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated hundreds of millions to support election integrity efforts. The billionaire couple does not appear to have continued their giving this cycle. 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.” Screenshot, Meta Ad Library / Forbes Meta’s election rules prohibit posts containing “misinformation about the dates, locations, times, and methods of voting” and “misinformation about whether a candidate is running or not,” and its ad rules prohibit ads that “call into question the legitimacy of an upcoming or ongoing election.” Many of the ads direct viewers to a page where they can purchase writings by Jim Rickards, a fringe economist turned conspiracy theorist and proponent of the New World Order conspiracy theory.
Others direct people to a page falsely claiming that a '‘‘Uniparty’ will win the election for Big Pharma.” Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels said: “We’re reviewing the ads and will remove any that violate our policies.” Rickards did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Forbes identified the false ads through the Meta Ad Library, a live repository of ads run on the company’s platforms, which provides details about political advertisers and how much money they spend. Forbes did not find parallel ads in Google’s ad library. TikTok and X have ad libraries in Europe, where they are required by law, but keep their U.
S. advertisers — and their ad spend — secret. ( In a previous life, I held content policy positions at Facebook and Spotify.
) Meta has a fraught history with election misinformation. In 2016, Russia’s Internet Research Agency used both ads and “organic” posts on Facebook to manipulate and divide U.S.
voters, steering them toward the candidacy of Donald Trump. In 2020, Facebook and WhatsApp were widely used by disgruntled supporters of former President Trump to spread “stop the steal” conspiracy theories and orchestrate the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S.
Capitol. Since 2021, Meta has dramatically reduced the amount of political posts that it serves to users — which may increase the power of paid political ads in reaching Facebook users with a candidate or party’s message. This year, Vice President Kamala Harris has dramatically outspent former President Donald Trump on Facebook ads.
In 2020, Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated more than $400 million to nonpartisan election integrity groups including The Center for Election Innovation and Research and The Center for Tech and Civic Life. The groups are focused on improving election infrastructure and do not endorse candidates. In 2024, a publishing house co-founded by Donald Trump Jr.
and MAGA influencer Sergio Gor began selling a coffee table book authored by Trump that alleged Zuckerberg had plotted against him in 2020. The book said of Zuckerberg: “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison.” Trump has also called Zuckerberg an “enemy of the people ,” and said that his newfound opposition to a ban on TikTok (which he first tried to ban in 2020) stems from his desire to stop Meta from becoming more powerful.
Zuckerberg does not appear to have continued his election integrity giving in 2024. However, he did call Trump a “badass” after the former president survived an assassination attempt in July. Trump claimed that Zuckerberg called him and told him that he “couldn’t vote for a Democrat” in the upcoming election.
Meta did not deny the call, but said that Zuckerberg had not said anything about how he would vote. MORE FROM FORBES Editorial Standards Forbes Accolades.
