Experiment finds TikTok, Facebook approve ads pushing election misinformation – Mashable

Midterm election misinformation brought to you by Facebook and TikTok. Credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images Facebook and TikTok failed to block paid advertisements spreading misinformation about voting in the 2022 midterm elections, according to a new report from the human rights non-profit Global Witness and the Cybersecurity for Democracy (C4D) Team at New York University. For its test, Global Witness created dummy accounts on Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube and attempted to run ten identical advertisements on each platform in both English and Spanish. Each ad contained “outright false and misleading election misinformation.” These ads contained falsehoods such as telling voters they needed to be vaccinated to vote in person or that voters would need to vote twice so that their votes would count. Other ads simply provided the wrong date for people to vote. The ads targeted voters in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania – all battleground states. Global Witness then went through the process involved in running this misinformation through each company’s official ad platform.All of the submitted advertisements were in violation of all three platforms’ policies.Yet, YouTube was the only platform to block all of these misinformation-spreading ads. Furthermore, YouTube was also the only platform…
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