This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
While Americans were listening to the political candidates and making up their minds about voting in 2020, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook worked with a couple of foundations to hand out $400 million plus.
It was a cash influence on the nation's elections that never before had happened, and it went mostly to leftist elections officials who used it to recruit Joe Biden voters.
Further, urged by the FBI's interference in the election, both social media and legacy media corporate executives suppressed accurate reporting by the New York Post about Biden family scandals confirmed in a laptop computer abandoned by Hunter Biden.
Now one social media oversight board member says such election meddling was just a starting point, and much more needs to be done.
The comment comes from Pamela San Martín, a member of Meta’s Oversight Board, in an interview with Wired.
"Even though we're addressing the problems that arose in prior elections as a starting point," she said, "It is not enough."
What was "not enough" was Facebook's deliberate censorship of the Post's reporting about the Biden family, and its suspension of accounts of President Donald Trump.
She claimed, "Between the U.S. election [in 2020] to the Brazilian election [in 2022], 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."
The fact is that earlier in America's history, differing viewpoints appeared in many different publications and outlets. Opinions were revealed and discussed. Many times consensus was developed.
Now, however, with only a few select corporations controlling vast swaths of the communications channels, such as social media, it is only their viewpoints that can reach the public. Any ideas they oppose, they simply censor.
The result is a population that is deprived of the information it needs to make electoral decisions.
Wired blasted Facebook in its report, with, "Meta, in particular, with some 3 billion users across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, is a uniquely powerful force in shaping the global information ecosystem. In 2016, the platform took center stage for its seemingly central role in propelling Donald Trump into the White House. Sensitive to criticism that it had not done enough to protect American democracy, Meta invested in new tools and processes to try and keep election-related misinformation and disinformation off its platforms during the 2020 presidential election. But once the race was over, reporting from OneZero at the time found that Stop the Steal groups continued to balloon in the weeks after the 2020 election. The company rolled back many of these new mitigating strategies, allowing narratives that questioned the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s win to circulate in the lead-up to the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. And despite the violence on January 6, Meta has continued to allow ads that question the results of the 2020 US election."
Martin said, "Social media platforms need to learn from past mistakes to be able to address them better this year. We’re convinced that social media [companies] have to do their part to meet these huge global challenges and what's happening around the world in these elections."
The oversight board is independent and is responsible for making recommendations to the company, which is not required to adopt them.
Meta's Corey Chambliss told Wired Protection the 2024 election is a top priority.
Martin insists there must be "real-time monitoring" on social media, and, "when you have longer electoral campaigns, real-time monitoring takes longer."
A report at The Federalist pointed out, "With the encouragement of intel agencies, Facebook engaged in plenty of election interference in 2020."
"On the same day, The New York Post published bombshell emails recovered from a laptop Hunter Biden left at a Delaware repair shop, Facebook’s policy communications director Andy Stone tweeted, 'While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want to be clear that this story is eligible to be fact-checked by Facebook’s third-party fact-checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform."
NPR admitted 'that means the platform’s algorithms won’t place posts linking to the story as highly in people’s news feeds, reducing the number of users who see it.' The platform had also removed a Trump campaign ad earlier that year, and would suspend Trump’s account in January 2021."
The report cited evidence that while Facebook presents information as "official," it is not always neutral.
"Instead it amplifies certain points of view and undermines others."
The report continued, "Aside from meddling with election-related content to control voters’ access to information, Facebook also spent the months and years leading up to the election censoring conservative voices, including the sitting president."
Of late, the report said, "The platform has worked with the Biden White House to censor the administration’s dissenters."
