Human Rights NGO reveals YouTube and Facebook are allowing election disinformation spread in Brazil.
Human Rights NGO reveals YouTube and Facebook enabling election disinformation to spread in Brazil. Despite efforts to combat misinformation, a small sample of ads were approved by the platforms, prompting concerns about the effectiveness of their review processes.
According to a new report by the human rights organization Global Witness, YouTube and Facebook are allowing election disinformation spread in Brazil. The NGO produced a series of purposely misleading ads during the election period in Brazil. Some of the mock ads called people not to vote; others questioned the credibility of the election and a few gave a false date for the ballots. Global Witness said YouTube approved all of them to run and Facebook approved half, although it highlighted it withdrew the ads before they were published. A Meta spokesperson said that the company invests significant resources to protect elections and rejected 135,000 Brazil-related ad submissions between 16 August and 30 September. According to the spokesperson, the Global Witness reports “were based on a very small sample of ads and are not representative given the number of political ads we review daily across the world.” On the other hand, YouTube explained that the company reviewed the ads in question and removed those that violated their policies, although the Global Witness report showed all the ads submitted were approved by the Google owned site.