Facebook To Ease Rules On Election Misinformation As Midterms Approach

Facebook's parent company Meta has decided that they are going to loosen their own rules about political and electoral misinformation, allowing more lies to flood their platform right before the midterms. This is a calculated move by the social media outlet, and it could be a ploy to convince Republicans to go easy on them if they retake the House of Representatives. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what could be happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Just in time for the midterms this year, folks, MEA the parent company of Facebook has decided that they're gonna pull back a little bit on, uh, allowing political misinformation on their platform. What's happening. Of course, is that meta let's I hate calling it meta it's Facebook, right? Facebook has been ever since 2016 and they allowed all the Russian propaganda on there and they've been like, okay, we're gonna try to cut back on it. Right. We're gonna do our best to curtail some of this, you know, the election propaganda coming from other countries, the election propaganda coming from troll farms. We're gonna slap those warning labels on some of the things that are totally false and we're gonna try to make right. And then as time is ticked on, they've been doing that a little bit less and less. And this year again, ahead of the midterms, they released their little outline of, you know, how we're gonna fight election misinformation, except for this year, it was only one page.

Okay. It wasn't a report. It, it wasn't a whole list of, we gotta do all these things. It was a single page where they're like, all right, guys, there you go. Figure it out because they don't care not to mention the fact that CrowdTangle the outside group that they have been using, of course, as not necessarily a fact checker, but just to make sure that everything is on the level that it's not coming from bot and troll farms, they're pretty much being shut out of the whole thing. And on most days CrowdTangle isn't even functioning properly. So it can't do the job that they were supposed to do in keeping all of the fake information off of Facebook.

So what's gonna happen at this point is that as we inch closer and closer to the elections, we're gonna see more misinformation on Facebook as per usual. You're gonna see your parents, possibly even your grandparents sharing this on the social media outlet, because those are the number one people who are out there sharing this fake news. They believe whatever you put in front of them. So they post links from websites. You've never heard of like the day daily eagle.net, uh, conservative brainstorm.com or whatever idiotic name they have. And those by the way are names that have been created in those little bot farms that they run in other countries, not just Russia, by the way, it happens all over the world. They pump out these idiotic misinformation articles and they attract the most gullible among us and Facebook already doing a horrible job of keeping that crap off their platform has now decided. They're just probably not even gonna fight it at all. And this, you know, coupled with a recent report saying Facebook was asking their board, you know, their misinformation board to say, Hey, maybe we need to cut back

On monitoring COVID misinformation. So Facebook is kind of once again, moving back into the, Hey, just say whatever the hell you wanna say, we don't care if it endangers people. We don't care if it swings elections here in the United States, we're Facebook do whatever the hell you want. So again, in the coming weeks and months, look forward to more election misinformation, more COVID misinformation, probably some monkeypox misinformation thrown in there as well because Facebook has made it clear. They simply don't give a.