Facebook ‘interfered’ with elections at least 39 times since 2008: report

During March, MRC studied the effects of Google interfering in elections and found that the tech giant "interfered" with elections at least 41 times. The MRC set their sights on Facebook afterwards to see how many times the social media platform "interfered" in elections.

The reported interference ramped up around 2020 when then-President Donald Trump and Joe Biden were vying to be in the White House.

"Like Google, Facebook has an extensive history of interfering in U.S. elections. But it’s not completely fair to compare the two companies. I believe some part of Mark Zuckerberg believes in free speech. Google management clearly does not.

"But regardless of what Mr. Zuckerberg believes, his company’s policies and practices have resulted in a great deal of censorship that always seems to target the same side of the political spectrum, and it needs to stop," MRC President Brent Bozell told reporters at Fox News.

The full study details the number of times that Meta has gotten involved in elections since 2008, when Barak Obama was elected president.

The number of times the tech giant is alleged to have interfered with elections in the US includes suspending a veterans' PAC for a meme drawing about the attack on Benghazi, that many blame Hillary Clinton for. It also censored then-Democratic Party candidate Bernie Sanders, as well as "conservative topics," as well as news.

During this time period, Facebook had a trending section on its website to track news and it was manually curated by contractors. In 2014 and 2015, curators of the feed told Gizmodo that articles in the trending section were dependent on the biases of the curators as well as what Facebook wanted trending.

There were several other instances, the report states, that censorship allegedly spiked on the social media platform during the 2020 election year during the contest between Donald Trump and President Joe Biden.

According to the report, the platform would censor ads from then-sitting President Trump and did so at least four times. One campaign ad was reportedly censored a month out from the election.

In 2024, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram apps began to limit political content for users. The X alternative, Threads, does not recommend political content at all by default.