A Meta Oversight Board member whined that the platform’s election-interfering 2020 censorship was “not enough.”
Despite a widely cited Media Research Center poll showing that Big Tech censorship altered 2020 presidential election results, Meta Oversight Board member Pamela San Martín claimed Facebook’s censorship was not sufficient. San Martín called for more censorship in a January interview with WIRED. She not only demanded increased censorship but announced that the Board has made a “lot of the decisions and the case selection” with the 2024 election in mind. She also urged Meta to strike “preemptively” for its election censorship.
San Martín’s suggestions for Meta include “adding labels to posts that are related to elections, directing people to reliable information, prohibiting paid advertisement when it calls into question the legitimacy of elections, and implementing WhatsApp forward limits.” Her advice to coordinate with election officials seems to be a direct encouragement toward tech-government censorship collusion.
“No election is exactly the same as the previous one,” San Martín confessed. “So even though we're addressing the problems that arose in prior elections as a starting point, it is not enough.” She suggested the Capitol protest on Jan. 6, 2021, was tied to online “misinformation.”
San Martín cited the 2020 and 2022 presidential elections in the U.S. and Brazil to claim that “Meta had not done enough to address the potential misuse of its platforms through coordinated campaigns, people organizing, or using bots on the platforms to convey a message to destabilize a country, to create a lack of trust or confidence on electoral processes.” Is this a specific recommendation to violate the First Amendment?
Despite voicing concerns about biased attempts to “silence” political opposition, San Martín exposed her own bias by scaremongering about Jan. 6., former President Donald Trump and the contested election loss of right-wing Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro. “In the Trump case, we recommended that Meta conduct a human rights impact assessment regarding how its algorithms play a role in amplifying the violent narratives that had been part of what led to January 6,” San Martín said, griping that Meta had not taken the Board’s advice. Meta did ban Trump from the Facebook and Instagram platforms for over two years.
Strikingly, a Media Research Center poll found in November 2020 that 17 percent of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s voters would not have voted for him had they known the scandals censored by Big Tech and media. Meta censorship is election interference.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Facebook headquarters at (650) 308-7300 and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “misinformation” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
