Facebook failed to filter ads containing electoral misinformation in Brazil , a new report from human rights group Global Witness has found, as the country prepares for a close election in October.
The international rights group posted ads in Brazilian Portuguese to Facebook that contained electoral misinformation, including false claims about where and when to vote, or sought to delegitimize the country’s electoral process.
“Alarmingly, all examples of election misinformation were approved,” Global Witness said.
Misinformation related to Brazil’s Oct. 2 vote has been a concern for months, with far-right President Jair Bolsonaro repeatedly saying without evidence that the country’s electronic voting system is vulnerable to fraud.
Critics and judicial experts have dismissed that as unfounded, accusing Bolsonaro, who is facing a stiff challenge from former left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of planning to use his claims of fraud to contest the election results, similarly to the former president of the United States, Donald Trump.
“Given the high-stakes nature of the Brazilian election, Facebook is failing in its efforts to adequately protect Brazilians from a disinformation nightmare,” Global Witness detailed in its report.
In a statement shared by Global Witness, Facebook said it has “prepared extensively for the 2022 elections in Brazil.”
“We launched tools that promote trustworthy information and label election-related posts, established a direct channel for the Superior Electoral Tribunal to send us potentially harmful content for review, and continue to collaborate closely with Brazilian authorities and investigators,” he said.
The social media giant also said its efforts in the previous Brazilian election “resulted in the removal of 140,000 posts from Facebook and Instagram for violating our election interference policies and 250,000 rejections of unauthorized political ads.”
In 2020, Facebook began requiring advertisers who want to run ads about elections or politics to complete an authorization process and include , similar to what it does in the US.
What did Global Witness detect in Brazil?
However, Global Witness said it was able to place ads that violated the company’s policies on who can place political ads on the platform. He explained that he placed the test ads for the Brazilian elections in Nairobi and London, “which should have raised flags given the content.”
“We were not required to put a ‘paid for’ disclaimer on our ads, as would be required for political ads. Also, we do not use a Brazilian payment method to pay for ads. Which raises serious concerns about the potential for foreign election interference and Facebook’s failure to detect red flags and clear warning signs,” the group said.
This is the fourth time that Global Witness has tested the ability of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to detect egregious violations of the rules of its most popular social media platform, and the fourth such test to fail.
In the three cases above, the nonprofit group submitted ads containing violent hate speech to see if Facebook’s controls (either human reviewers or artificial intelligence) would catch them, but the company didn’t.
In another study conducted by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, researchers identified more than two dozen ads on Facebook and Instagram for the month of July that promoted misleading information or attacked the country’s electronic voting machines.
The university’s internet and social media department, NetLab, which was also involved in the Global Witness study, found that many of them had been funded by candidates running for a seat in a federal or state legislature.
Brazil’s October election will be the first since Bolsonaro came to power in 2018, and fears of political violence are rising if the results are challenged.
