Why is Big Tech so obsessed with election interference? A top Meta executive just boasted that his company is “getting better” at censoring U.S. election “misinformation.”
Meta Global Affairs President Nick Clegg made the controversial confession during an interview with Yahoo! Finance on July 21. In the interview, Clegg, a former UK deputy prime minister, bragged that Meta has made “massive investments” in resources to censor so-called election “misinformation” and “disinformation,” even explaining how his company determines how much election-related information users can access on its platforms. This open admission of online election interference from a UK executive of U.S.-based Meta comes as the House Judiciary Committee considers holding Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress for not handing over censorship records.
Clegg seemed to try and cushion the blow by noting that the company interferes with elections around the world. “Over 95% of our users are outside the United States, and we have elections every single month in many different parts of the world,” Clegg claimed. “So it’s not as if we only ever have to prepare ourselves for the U.S. election.”
“Facebook and its CEO have a long track record of interfering in US elections, especially in the last presidential contest,” said Dan Schneider, MRC’s Vice President for Free Speech America. “Completely burying all news relating to the Biden extortion racket swung the election for Biden. Pretending that an election in Mongolia is just as important as the presidential election in the US is absurd.”
The Meta executive went on to detail his company’s censorship apparatus. “We have teams, we have highly sophisticated automated models which are working to deal with elections non-stop, all year round…month in and month out,” he said. Unfortunately, practice makes perfect. “And with each election, we learn more because it’s a very adversarial space,” Sir Nick Clegg boasted. “So, I do think we’re getting better.” Meta’s censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal helped alter the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Clegg proudly continued, “We have constant practice in doing this, we have made massive investments—I think world-beating [and] certainly industry-leading technology to deal with misinformation, disinformation and so on. We give users as much information as we—as we possibly can.” Why should Meta, particularly non-U.S. executives of Meta, determine what election-related information American users can access?
The executive also noted dismissively that his platform censors both bots and humans with the same utter disregard for free speech. “And as I said earlier, it doesn’t really matter from our point of view whether the material, if it’s unwelcome, and we want to block it or restrict it, [if it] is produced by a machine or a human being, we will try and tackle it,” he said.
Clegg’s comments are particularly disturbing in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, after the platform’s election-altering censorship in 2020. Clegg’s boss Zuckerberg previously admitted to censoring the Hunter Biden laptop scandal after the FBI primed the platform beforehand. A 2020 MRC study found that censorship of the Hunter scandals helped steal the election for Joe Biden, constituting blatant election interference.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Facebook headquarters at (650) 308-7300 and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on election “misinformation” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
