Social media giant Facebook has interfered with U.S. elections almost 40 times since 2008, a new study from the Media Research Center revealed.
The group found that Facebook censored 2024 presidential candidates, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and 2022 Senate and House candidates on their platform.
The social media company also removed Virginia gubernatorial candidate Amanda Chase’s account and “shuttered political advertising one week before the election” in 2020, according to the MRC’s analysis.
MRC also said there were at least three instances when Facebook leadership publicly voiced support for free online speech but took a different path afterward.
“Facebook/Zuckerberg voiced support for free speech online, but after the remarks, the Big Tech platform went in the opposite direction,” wrote MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider and editor Gabriela Pariseau, who conducted the study.
“But following a series of so-called ‘civil rights’ audits conducted by the left, COO Sheryl Sandberg praised the leftist recommendations and committed to ‘put more of their proposals into practice,’ which she did,” they also wrote.
In response to Facebook’s election track record, the group outlined a series of recommendations for government leaders at the state and federal level.
House Speaker Johnson “should direct relevant committees and committee chairmen to investigate Facebook for interfering in elections,” “state attorneys general and state secretaries of state should take appropriate action to enforce state election laws as it relates to Facebook’s election interference” and “state legislatures should ensure that Big Tech cannot engage in viewpoint discrimination.”
“Like Google, Facebook has an extensive history of interfering in U.S. elections. But it’s not completely fair to compare the two companies,” Media Research Center founder and President Brent Bozell told Fox News.
“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 Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider and editor Gabriela Pariseau wrote a 10,000-word breakdown of the findings.
“Zuckerberg and his company have a complicated relationship with free speech. The Meta CEO has repeatedly made decisive statements in support of freedom of speech that have condemned fact checking, Big Tech election interference and political censorship, and yet his platform participates in all three,” Schneider and Pariseau wrote.
“It seems Meta — now Facebook’s parent company — has consistently found itself caught between doing the bidding of the left, which claims to prioritize keeping the internet free from so-called misinformation at all costs, and placating the right, which prioritizes freedom of speech as the cornerstone of representational democracy,” they continued before diving into examples.
