Tech giant Meta has proudly unveiled its plan to control content as censorship … er, election season nears in the European Union.
Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — has a whole slate of actions planned ahead of the upcoming EU parliament elections. From its partnership with the biggest fact-checking network to weaponized artificial intelligence (AI) to an Elections Operations Center, Meta is fully committed to election-related censorship. This Feb. 25 release comes soon after Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg accidentally admitted on CNBC News that a majority of the company’s employees are involved in censorship activities.
It appears that anti-free speech European legislation has spurred Meta’s zeal, as the press release cited the Digital Services Act and EU Code of Practice on Disinformation. Meta bragged that it invested over $20 billion in “safety and security,” which is leftist speak for “censorship.” The release further cited that Meta “quadrupled” its safety team which now has “around 40,000 people,” including 15,000 “content reviewers.” A CNBC hot mic really put that number into perspective, highlighting the enlarged team as approximately 60 percent of the platform’s workforce.
Meta’s release described 26 fact-checking partners for 22 languages in the EU, including three new partners. Fact-checked content will have warning labels and reduced distribution, thus suppressing any content of which the biased tech giant disapproves, according to the release. These include any ads questioning election “legitimacy,” indicating that allegations of voter fraud will be targeted. Meta also claimed it would engage in “media literacy” campaigns for “[c]ombatting misinformation,” a vague term applied to any speech with which leftists disagree. “Between July and December 2023, for example, over 68 million pieces of content viewed in the EU on Facebook and Instagram had fact checking labels,” Meta proudly declared.
One of Meta’s EU election efforts involves AI, as Meta is “committed to taking a responsible approach to new technologies like GenAI, and signed on to the tech accord to combat the spread of deceptive AI content in elections.” State-controlled media accounts, particularly from Russia, will also be labeled as such, Meta added.
Ironically, in its new press release, Meta claimed to have “comprehensive policies to prevent election interference and voter fraud.” Yet Meta’s censorship activities appear to be election interference too.
In fact, censorship can impact election results. 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 been aware of the president’s scandals that Big Tech and the legacy media censored. Yet Meta’s Oversight Board members recently advocated for increased censorship.
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.
