As Media Matters has documented in the past, Facebook has regularly struggled to notice and respond to large foreign spammer networks and sites posting fake news, such as YourNewsWire, that spread viral misinformation on the platform. As outlined below, between 2018 and early 2021, a number of false claims spread on Facebook, including harmful anti-vaccination content, misinformation surrounding COVID-19, and content that runs contrary to scientific consensus on climate change.

Apart from the health-related conspiracy theories, an onslaught of misinformation regarding the 2020 presidential election was also presented on the platform. The widespread circulation of disinformation amplified election conspiracy theories, such as debunked claims of mass voting fraud, and also advertised the deranged QAnon conspiracy theory, which began in 2017 with a series of anonymous posts on the 4chan online message board by “Q,” a person claiming to be a high-ranking government insider exposing a satanic cabal of celebrities and other high-profile officials. These extremist conspiracy theories gained traction in both public and private groups on the platform in 2020, ultimately contributing to the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

December 2018

• On December 17, 2018, Brian Kolfage launched a GoFundMe page asking for $5 billion to fund President Donald Trump’s wall at the United States’ southern border. Within the span of three days, due to the widespread reach of right-wing clickbait articles from fake news-purveying outlets on Facebook shared by conservative figures, the campaign amassed $7 million. Though the platform had originally attempted to ban Kolfage’s fake news site Right Wing News for “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” the fundraiser page continued to be shared on other pages, such as Conservative Post and American Joe. Facebook further allowed these articles to be shared by right-wing media figures and pages with large followings, helping the fundraising page garner over 1.3 million interactions. 

• In December 2018, Media Matters conducted a study showing how a hoax about the LGBTQ+ community accepting, and embracing, pedophiles went viral, with the help of Facebook. Though this false smear had been spread through right-wing groups and figures for years, it was only after a prominent right-wing outlet, The Daily Caller, posted a piece about it on Facebook in July 2018 that the story gained notable virality. By the time this study was released, the narrative had garnered over 875,000 Facebook impressions through various stories and posts. 

March 2019

• As Facebook groups began gaining popularity on the platform for uniting users with common interests, anti-vaccination propaganda became more prominent. Although Facebook vowed to take action against anti-vaccination groups in March 2019, factors such as the site’s recommendation algorithm and the platform's failure to quickly roll out bans mean the reach of this misinformation is still widespread.

October 2019

• NBC News reported that anti-vaccination activists are still able to use Facebook fundraisers to pay for billboards filled with misinformation, "despite a platform-wide crackdown on such campaigns.”

February 2020

• As COVID-19 cases began to rise in the United States, an influx of misinformation about the coronavirus fueled by right-wing outlets made its way onto Facebook. These stories fed into racist and xenophobic narratives, while also paving the way for the spread of dangerous misinformation about the virus and its origins. Due to Facebook’s lack of accountability regarding fact-checking, pieces such as a New York Post article claiming that the virus was made in a lab by the Chinese government accumulated over 360,000 interactions. False stories like this were rampant at the start of the virus, and though measures have been taken to mitigate this problem since, there is still a stream of misinformation regarding the pandemic on the platform.

May 2020

• In May, Media Matters reported on the spread of a documentary-style film called Plandemic that contained multiple false claims about COVID-19 and public health. The film featured prominent anti-vaccination figures who pushed false narratives as a way of skewing public perception of the virus. Through Facebook alone, the video got over 16 million engagements. Facebook continued to approve ads for the video despite saying it would take them down, but eventually removed them:

Facebook approved multiple ads that are currently running that link to the misinformation-filled coronavirus conspiracy theory video “Plandemic.” This is despite Facebook's announcement yesterday that they would be removing the video from the platform. https://t.co/ecOLXqHJLT pic.twitter.com/jSgAg376AY

— Alex Kaplan (@AlKapDC) May 8, 2020

Facebook approved an ad on Saturday that's currently running that links to the misinformation-filled coronavirus conspiracy theory video “Plandemic” via an Infowars streaming platform. This is despite Facebook pledging to block both Infowars content & “Plandemic” from Facebook. pic.twitter.com/mnBMr7GMLv

— Alex Kaplan (@AlKapDC) May 11, 2020

• Meanwhile, businesses on Facebook claimed that 5G, the fifth generation of mobile technology, could transmit and/or make individuals more susceptible to COVID-19. Media Matters found several businesses on Facebook linking the technology to the coronavirus in an effort to sell supposed 5G protection products. Facebook removed several of the posts following publication of the report.

• Facebook has repeatedly claimed that it would “remove COVID-19 related misinformation that could contribute to imminent physical harm.” Despite these promises, the platform allowed these dangerous narratives to be spread and has continued to fail at upholding its own policies time and time again. 

June 2020

• A Media Matters report discussed how Facebook allows climate science deniers to thrive on its platform by claiming the information they portray to the public is “opinion”-based. Through this loophole, climate denial stories are able to avoid fact-checking. At the same time, right-wing outlets such as Fox News and The Washington Times are listed as “trusted” sources for Facebook News despite running false stories regarding climate change.

July 2020

• During the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook had claimed it would remove any coronavirus-related misinformation that could “contribute to imminent physical harm.” However, as of July, Media Matters had found at least 55 Facebook groups dedicated to opposing the use of masks. These groups share harmful medical misinformation and conspiracy theories, such as claims that mask usage could cause the death of children or that masks can lead to carbon dioxide toxicity. Combined, these groups have amassed over 57,000 members.

• In July, Twitter announced a major crackdown on accounts promoting the extremist QAnon conspiracy theory. Meanwhile, Facebook has allowed and profited off of at least 144 ads promoting the conspiracy theory in some manner for the past year and a half. Facebook claims action is forthcoming against QAnon content on the platform but has yet to do anything substantial as the conspiracy theory continues to spread. On August 7, Facebook finally took some action against the conspiracy theory by removing one of the largest QAnon groups from the platform. However, NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny said a spokesperson for Facebook told her that “this Qanon group removal is a one-off.”

• Media Matters showed in July 2020 that Facebook and YouTube have given prominent anti-vaccine figure Del Bigtree near-impunity on their platforms to spread dangerous medical misinformation about the novel coronavirus and the development of a vaccine for the COVID-19 disease. Facebook then removed three of Del Bigtree’s videos, but separate videos in which Bigtree encouraged people to intentionally contract COVID-19 and attacked mask-wearing with the same medical falsehoods are still available on Facebook.

August 2020

• In August 2020, Facebook’s internal group for Muslim employees, called “Muslim@,” penned a letter to the company detailing its pattern of favoritism toward India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. The letter from staffers in the U.S., India, and the Middle East called for a review of the company’s handling of hate speech, specifically from prominent Hindu nationalist hard-liners and high-profile politicians. 

September 2020

• In September 2020, Trump amplified a bogus QAnon conspiracy theory about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by retweeting a claim that only 6% of recorded COVID-19 deaths are actually due to the disease, while the other 94% are falsified. Soon after, the conspiracy theory began to circulate rapidly on social media -- in particular, on Facebook. Despite the dangers posed by COVID-19 misinformation, Facebook chose to only include a fact check on some of the posts sharing this false claim. This did not prevent many of Facebook’s conservative pages and figures, ranging from Republican candidates to QAnon groups, from spreading the conspiracy theory with impunity.

• Beginning in September 2020, a campaign emerged on Facebook and Instagram urging people to throw out or burn their face masks en masse on September 15 as a protest against mask mandates. These posts gained at least tens of thousands of engagements on both platforms and contained memes encouraging people to “throw that filthy thing away.”

October 2020

• In October 2020, Media Matters found at least 80 advertisements on both Facebook and Instagram that violated the platforms' U.S. election policy while amassing more than 2 million impressions. Prior to the 2020 presidential election, Facebook announced that it “won’t allow ads with content that seeks to delegitimize the outcome of an election.” The policy, which was supposedly “effective immediately” on Facebook and Instagram, also applied to ads describing legitimate voting methods as fraudulent or otherwise alleging widespread voter fraud, among other forms of election disinformation.

• Facebook pledged in August 2020 to remove content associated with “movements and organizations tied to violence,” including the QAnon conspiracy theory. In spite of this promise, Media Matters identified a number of active groups still on the platform in October -- some of which contained over 40 violent death threats calling for the execution of liberal philanthropist George Soros.

• When Trump contracted COVID-19 in October 2020, he received multiple treatments, including Regeneron’s experimental monoclonal antibody therapy. Following his recovery, he falsely claimed that antibody therapy was a “cure” for the virus, which his campaign then amplified in dozens of ads in key swing states touting the “medicine.” The ads falsely claimed that Americans were going to get the antibody therapy “for free -- no charge.” In reality, Regeneron reportedly had enough doses produced at the time for only 50,000 patients.

November 2020

• On Election Day, users in private Facebook groups were encouraging people to go to their polling place without a mask, with one user suggesting that not wearing a mask would “scare liberals away” from the polls. Even before Election Day, private Facebook groups urged others to do certain things that may help sway the results. Media Matters uncovered discussions in private QAnon and anti-mask Facebook groups in which users said they were volunteering to be poll watchers or election officials. In these groups, members encouraged others to also sign up for these positions so as to “validate the mail-in ballots” and “challenge the democrat judge on ballots that look iffy.” 

• As Arizona counted its ballots during the 2020 election, a false claim began circulating on Facebook asserting that local poll workers had Trump-supporting voters fill out their ballots with Sharpie permanent markers in order to invalidate them. Election officials declared this to be a myth, stating that Sharpies are an acceptable ink for use on ballots. Despite Facebook’s announcement that it would be taking steps to mitigate the spread of election and voting misinformation, a video promoting the false allegations was posted on the platform numerous times, garnering hundreds of thousands of views. In particular, the video spread like wildfire within Facebook groups.

• Even while votes were still being counted, a baseless claim from the Trump campaign and right-wing media that Democrats were attempting to “steal” the election spread within dozens of public and private Facebook groups. At the time, Media Matters identified at least 19 public groups and 15 private groups touting this allegation, accumulating approximately 50,000 members in 24 hours. Though Facebook took down 14 of the groups following Media Matters’ initial reporting, the narrative continued to gain momentum for months leading up to the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

• Despite comments from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to his employees that President-elect Joe Biden was “going to be our next president,” Trump repeatedly used the platform to lie about supposed election fraud and to cast doubt on the outcome.

January 2021

• On January 6, a mob of violent Trump supporters -- animated by election fraud conspiracy theories that had been circulating Facebook and right-wing media for months -- stormed the U.S. Capitol in order to stop the certification of Biden’s victory. The insurrection resulted in multiple deaths, hundreds of injuries, and facilitated the spread of COVID-19 to several lawmakers. Afterward, Facebook finally took limited action against efforts to organize and promote “Stop the Steal” events on its platform, including removing organizer Ali Alexander and “Stop the Steal” content from the site. However, the company chose to implement an extremely limited policy barring only posts or groups using that exact phrase. Correspondingly, the platform still allows activity dedicated to stopping mythical claims of election fraud to continue to thrive on Facebook.

• Despite clear warning signs, such as an influx of conspiracy theories calling for violence, Facebook ultimately failed to take action against hundreds of groups that were trying to delegitimize the election. In the days following the attack, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg downplayed the company’s responsibility, saying, “I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate, and don’t have our standards, and don’t have our transparency.” However, Media Matters had identified at least 70 “Stop the Steal” groups on Facebook, 46 of which were private, demonstrating Facebook’s continued struggle to enforce its policies within private groups.

• During a two-hour Facebook livestream on January 5, high-profile anti-vaccine figures attempted to undermine the Food and Drug Administration-approved COVID-19 vaccines by promoting misinformation and repeatedly attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci, the long-serving head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. This video gained approximately 190,000 views as of January 13, 2021 -- despite Facebook’s supposed commitment to prohibiting the spread of content that promotes misinformation about COVID-19 or the vaccines.

• Prior to the fatal pro-Trump riots on January 6, multiple Republican Party organizations used Facebook to help supporters come to Washington, D.C., posting a flyer that called for “Operation Occupy the Capitol” and promoting the hashtag “1776Rebel.”

• Despite Facebook’s claim to have implemented policies prohibiting the spread of COVID-19 misinformation, an array of private Facebook groups -- including pro-Trump groups and some that oppose stay-at-home orders, mask guidelines, or vaccines -- used the platform to promote content and events and encouraging users to flout COVID-19 preventative measures and go “maskless shopping.”

• As COVID-19 vaccinations first rolled out across the U.S., falsified videos depicting supposed adverse vaccine reactions began making waves on Facebook. In one example, several women claimed to have been recently vaccinated and alleged that they were experiencing numerous side effects. There is no evidence that these accusations are true, yet the videos spread unchecked on the platform for days, garnering millions of views and Facebook engagements.

• In an investigation by The Guardian, 430 pages -- followed by 45 million people -- were found using Facebook to spread false information about COVID-19 and vaccinations, Users were also able to use Facebook’s tools, such as fan subscriptions, to profit from the spread of these dangerous and false conspiracy theories.

• In his final days in office, Trump reportedly held discussions about forming a new political party, supposedly to be named the “Patriot Party.” Just as his supporters had previously used Facebook to organize pro-Trump protests, the “Patriot Party” concept has gained momentum on the platform, with some groups growing by thousands of members in days. Many of these Facebook groups have adopted common symbols tied to white nationalism. An investigation by the Tech Transparency Project found “Facebook’s algorithms have helped to drive the growth of the Patriot Party movement by recommending content to users through its Related Pages feature.”

• In January 2021, national civil rights organization Muslim Advocates called out Facebook’s Oversight Board -- a supposedly independent body that evaluates decisions by the platform to remove certain kinds of content -- for “protecting and reinstating" an anti-Muslim post in Myanmar “showing images of a dead Muslim child and saying ‘those male Muslims have something wrong in their mindset.’”

Facebook may have faced its biggest backlash due to multiple data breaches and privacy violations on the platform that affected millions of users. Facebook’s most notorious data privacy breach happened before the 2016 election, when data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica illegally obtained and exploited the data of 50 million Facebook users in multiple countries. In addition, we learned in late 2018 that Facebook had allowed third party tech companies to access users’ data, including the ability to read and delete private messages. From 2018 to 2021, the platform dealt with continued fallout from past data breaches and further reporting about how much data Facebook gathers on its users.

November 2018

• Facebook claimed that it has never sold any user’s data. Inherently, this is not possible. As an op-ed in The New York Times states, “Each time you click on a Facebook ad, Facebook sells data on you to that advertiser.” 

January 2019

• A study published by Pew Research Center in January 2019 showed that 74% of users did not know Facebook maintained a list of interests and traits of an individual’s profile, and 51% also said that they are not comfortable with Facebook compiling this information. 

February 2019

• In the final report of the U.K. Parliament’s 18-month investigation into disinformation and fake news, its Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee accused Facebook of deliberately hindering its case. Additionally, the committee denounced the platform’s failure in subduing Russian attempts to manipulate elections. 

September 2019

• A database which contained the phone numbers and personal information of over 400 million Facebook users across the U.S., the U.K., and Vietnam was exposed and publicized. According to The Verge, “Facebook confirmed the data was scraped from a server that stored it as part of a feature that let users look one another up by their phone numbers.”

Facebook’s policy regarding hate speech has drawn backlash due to its inconsistent and even negligent enforcement. In 2019, Media Matters wrote about Zuckerberg saying he supports “free expression” while also prohibiting discrimination -- presenting a false choice between free expression and censorship. While freedom of expression is a fundamental aspect of human rights, when the line crosses to include inflammatory, and even false, claims against individuals -- whether concerning their race, sexual orientation, gender, or religious beliefs, etc. -- the platform must act, which it promised its users it would do. Despite claims that the platform takes these issues seriously, Facebook’s failures to enforce these policies have persisted. 

January 2019

• A sexist smear against Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) claiming that her professional accomplishments were due to a past relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown grew in popularity late January 2019. A lurid Fox News article received over 97,000 interactions on Facebook. The story gained traction, and despite the platform’s “commitment” to combating hateful speech, an Infowars commentator went on a misogynistic rant about Harris on a Facebook livestream, sexualizing the senator by saying she “basically sucked and ducked her way to the top.” 

March 2019

• Anti-Muslim rhetoric thrives on Facebook, mostly through misinformative stories such as pieces claiming Muslims in Ramallah and Gaza celebrated the 9/11 attacks on the United States or that they have intentionally been spreading COVID-19 because “engaging in Civilization Jihad is the only hope Muslims have of maybe getting in to ‘heaven’.” Though the platform has taken steps to remove pages that spread this hate speech, Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who researches online harassment, said Facebook chooses to do so only “from a place of corporate ass-covering instead of a strong ideological position.”

June 2019

• Hundreds of law enforcement officials -- both active-duty and retired -- throughout the United States have found a home in “Confederate, anti-Islam, misogynistic or anti-government militia groups on Facebook,” a study by Reveal found.

July 2019

• In March 2019, Facebook announced its aim to transition to and invest more in private groups and messaging, with a huge marketing push in July 2019. This decision was met with skepticism due to discoveries of hate-filled private groups, such as one in which Border Patrol agents “joke about migrant deaths.” The reach of the platform, combined with its recommendation algorithm, helps these dangerous and hate-filled groups prosper.

February 2020

• An anti-Semitic Telegram channel created new Facebook accounts to further spread its hateful content. This channel is known for targeting Jews and, at the time, had attempted to name or mark multiple people for harassment. Facebook deleted the accounts within 48 hours of Media Matters originally flagging the page, stating, “We have removed this Page for violating our Community Standards.” This contradicts the platform’s initial review of the page.

May 2020

• Self-proclaimed “boogaloo boy” Aaron Swenson allegedly used Facebook Live to threaten the murder of a police officer. The boogaloo ideology falls under a widespread group of right-wing extremists who also call for violent uprisings against the federal government. By allowing the video to be livestreamed on the platform, Facebook continues to feed the proliferation of extremists and extremist groups.

June 2020

• Three men were arrested in Las Vegas for planning to attend a Black Lives Matter protest armed with Molotov cocktails. They intended to target police officials as a way of inciting violence. The men were all part of the “Nevada Boogaloo Facebook group.”

• Facebook is reportedly attempting to ban pages associated with the “boogaloo” movement by prohibiting “the use of Boogaloo and related terms when they accompany pictures of weapons and calls to action, such as preparing for conflict.” However, The Washington Post reported that a research group found “nearly two dozen Facebook pages affiliated with the ‘boogaloo’ movement … that included explicit calls for armed violence as well as more borderline content such as anti-government memes employing euphemisms for violence.”

July 2020

• A loose network of Facebook pages has become the epicenter of mass misinformation regarding the Black Lives Matter protests, following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. These groups were originally created to organize protests in April over COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. As of July 2020, the groups have amassed over a combined 1 million users. Within these groups, there are a number of posts mocking the BLM movement as well as using profane slurs against Black people and the protesters.

• Civil rights groups launched the #StopHateforProfit campaign which calls on businesses to pull Facebook ads in response to the platform’s failure to end hate speech and harassment targeted at Black users. The platform offered “the same old talking points” and intended to take “no real action” in response, the groups said, and this reaction comes after years of Facebook caving to right-wing pressure campaigns and offering them meaningful, tangible concessions. Several major companies eventually pulled their ads from the platform, and Facebook spending from major companies took a nosedive in July.

September 2020

• Facebook announced in August 2020 that, under its hate speech policies, the platform would remove posts that promote anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. But in September 2020, the Trump campaign began running ads on Facebook depicting now-President Joe Biden as a puppet of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) -- invoking a classic anti-Semitic and harmful image of a Jewish public figure as a puppetmaster. These ads received at least 550,000 impressions on the platform.

October 2020

• The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a report in October 2020 which identified a high frequency of hate speech directed toward Black and Jewish people following the nationwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism in May of that year. According to Forbes, “Of the Facebook messages containing references to Black Americans, 7% contained derogatory language, versus 9% of messages about Jewish Americans, amounting to one in every 150 posts being hateful to Black Americans and more than one in every 300 being hateful toward Jewish Americans.”

Facebook has a history of resisting accountability, including for its inaction to prevent election misinformation and interference, for data breaches on its platform, and for fostering an environment where radicalization and misinformation flourish. For example, Facebook would not allow researchers access to data to examine how misinformation spreads on the platform after the 2016 election and did a poor job preventing conspiracy theories from spreading about the Parkland school shooting in 2018. Facebook has received widespread criticism for its role in amplifying radical conspiracy theories, propagating COVID-19 misinformation, and indulging right-wing extremism. Instead of resolving these issues by creating and consistently enforcing appropriate content policies, Facebook has usually responded with insufficient, half-baked policies with little to no follow-through. In July 2020, civil rights groups launched the #StopHateforProfit campaign, pressuring companies to pull ads from Facebook because of the platform’s inability to respond to hate speech and dangerous misinformation. The company’s position is almost always too little, too late.

February 2019

• Facebook announced in February that it had banned four groups as “dangerous organizations” for promoting violence against and ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya population in Myanmar. However, Vox reported that “some local human rights groups and critics are already objecting to Facebook’s choice of these groups, saying it’s arbitrary at best and harmful at worst.” In 2017 and 2018, Facebook had been criticized for being “too slow to respond to inflammatory posts” on its platform that incited violence against the Muslim minority group. In August 2020, Facebook “objected to a request from Gambia … to release posts and communications by members of Myanmar’s military and police.”

• A February 2019 report from The Verge detailed accounts from “a dozen current and former employees” of a contractor called Cognizant that Facebook uses to moderate its content, who discussed the mental health issues they experience from having to see graphic and violent content. According to The Verge, the “employees can be fired for making just a few errors a week” and “team leaders micromanage content moderators’ every bathroom and prayer break.” The employees had all “signed non-disclosure agreements with Cognizant in which they pledged not to discuss their work for Facebook — or even acknowledge that Facebook is Cognizant’s client. … The secrecy also insulates Cognizant and Facebook from criticism about their working conditions," the moderators told the Verge. These contractors also make radically less money and have less freedom than a typical Facebook employee.

April 2019

• After Facebook launched a new policy against white supremacist content in March 2019, Media Matters found that a series of extremist pages were still up even though they include claims that “multiculturalism is genocide,” criticism of race mixing, and celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s killer.

May 2019

• Facebook announced on May 2, 2019, that various pages associated with Alex Jones’ conspiracy theory website Infowars would be “subject to the strictest ban” of its “policies against dangerous individuals and organizations” due to Jones’ record in circumventing social media bans. However, Media Matters identified a number of pages still up on Facebook, some of which were later removed.

October 2019

• During an October 23 House of Representatives Financial Services Committee hearing, Zuckerberg falsely claimed that an outside entity was responsible for deciding which organizations Facebook uses as fact-checkers. This was in response to a question about right-wing website The Daily Caller’s inclusion as a fact-checker despite its promotion of misinformation. Facebook does indeed decide who is included as a fact checker.

January 2020

• Gun sellers found a loophole in Facebook’s policy prohibiting firearm sales on the platform by advertising gun cases or boxes on Facebook Marketplace. Then, in the platform’s private messenger application, these sellers offered users complete firearms. Facebook has been aware of these practices since at least August 2019.

April 2020

• On April 2, Facebook hosted a virtual town hall with Fox News on the coronavirus pandemic. The event featured Mike Rowe, the former host of the television show Dirty Jobs, who had used Facebook to downplay the risks of COVID-19.

• Facebook announced in April that it would remove events listed on Facebook that violated stay-at-home orders, but Media Matters identified many Facebook events -- as well as some pages and groups hosting events or featuring posts promoting events -- that were still live on the site.

May 2020

• A major report from The Wall Street Journal revealed that Facebook has known for years that it is fomenting political polarization -- and that its top executives refused to implement proposed solutions to stop it. Specifically, the report cites an internal Facebook presentation from 2016 which found that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools”; the presentation stated bluntly that “our recommendation systems grow the problem.”

June 2020

• The Verge reported that while Facebook and other social media companies were “showing up” for racial injustice following the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer, the same platforms “were stunningly silent six years ago” following the killing of Michael Brown. For example, while Facebook’s Zuckerberg “committed to giving ‘additional $10 million to groups working on racial justice’” in 2020, the only public statement The Verge could find him making in 2014 was when he answered a question at a town hall about “social media’s role in helping strengthen communities in the wake of Ferguson and other protests against the use of excessive police force.”

July 2020

• An independent audit of Facebook’s treatment of civil rights was released in July, with CNN summarizing it by reporting that “Facebook continues to operate with glaring blind spots for hateful content and misinformation on the site and has made a number of decisions in the last year that ‘represent significant setbacks for civil rights.’” The New York Times reported that climate misinformation goes unchecked on Facebook because “under the company’s guidelines, climate content can be classified as opinion and therefore exempted from fact-checking procedures.” This leads to “peer-reviewed science … lumped into the same category as industry statements and even blatant disinformation.”

• While Zuckerberg in July criticized the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, Trump’s messaging dominated top posts on the platform earlier this year, with Trump accounting for half of the 10 posts about COVID-19 with the most engagement from February through May.

September 2020

• On September 3, Facebook announced a new policy claiming it would bar any new political ads one week before Election Day. Media Matters President Angelo Carusone addressed this change in a statement, saying, “Facebook’s new ad policy announcement is designed to fool the media and the public into thinking the company is taking disinformation seriously; this new policy is pointless - and may even do more harm than good.” He noted that this strategy would “only further empower those seeking to do harm, while weakening the ability of outside forces to counteract attacks and misinformation, something that has proven necessary given Facebook’s weak enforcement.”

• According to a September 14 report by BuzzFeed News, a former data scientist for Facebook released a 6,600 word memo detailing how the platform willingly allowed leaders and political parties of foreign countries -- including Azerbaijan, Honduras, India, and many more -- to use the platform to manipulate voters, explicitly undermining elections in those countries and impacting political affairs worldwide.

• In a September interview with Mike Allen of Axios, Zuckerberg claimed that allegations the platform was a “right-wing echo chamber” were unfounded. Media Matters debunked this inaccurate claim by once again illustrating how right-wing centric the platform has become, this time presenting a list from New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose of the “top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages” from the day after the Axios interview. Ten out of 10 were right-wing outlets or figures that have propagated misinformation.

• In August, Facebook had promised to remove QAnon groups that “discuss potential violence.” But by September, many QAnon-affiliated Facebook groups which explicitly violated this policy were still active and gaining members. Facebook’s excuse for this seemingly lackadaisical approach regarding its own policy enforcement claimed that the groups strategically designed ways to “evade” enforcement mechanisms. However, Media Matters documented 19 public Facebook groups dedicated to the conspiracy theory that featured basic QAnon identifiers in their title, description, or posts, such as the letter “Q” or “WWG1WGA,” a common QAnon slogan meaning “where we go one, we go all.”

October 2020

• On October 6, Facebook disclosed that it was allegedly going to remove all QAnon-affiliated groups and pages from the platform. However, almost 24 hours after the announcement, Media Matters found that many QAnon groups remained accessible, and this slow approach allowed many group administrators to organize jumps to other, less-moderated platforms.

November 2020

• Less than 24 hours before Election Day, a video titled “Left Plans Coup / Revolution Nov 3rd 2020?” was the second recommended result for Facebook Live. By the time the video was taken down, it had been viewed by over 110,000 people.

• On November 17, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing with Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, during which Zuckerberg boasted about Facebook’s election integrity strategies, claiming its “systems performed well” during the election season. On November 19, Facebook released an enforcement report bragging about the platform’s performance, claiming it “removed more than 265,000 pieces of content in the U.S. for voter interference and added labels to 180 million pieces of content that were debunked by fact-checkers.” The report did not include how much election misinformation it had missed, even though independent reports indicated that “Facebook removed and labeled only a fraction of COVID-19 misinformation on the platform, suggesting it may be similar for election misinformation.”

January 2021

• Following the disastrous Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Zuckerberg pledged in March 2018 to carry out a full audit “of any app with suspicious activity.” According to a January 26 hearing with the U.K.’s information commissioner, a secret agreement resulting in a settlement between her office and Facebook “prevents her from publicly answering whether or not Facebook contacted the ICO about completing” said audit. According to TechCrunch:

The settlement looks to have been extremely convenient for Facebook. Not only was it fantastically cheap (Facebook paid $5BN to settle with the FTC in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal just a short while later); and not only did it provide Facebook with a trove of ICO-obtained data to do its own digging into Cambridge Analytica safely out of the public eye; but it also ensured the UK regulator would be restricted in what it could say publicly.

• After a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, Facebook finally took limited action and suspended the president’s ability to post -- temporarily. Within three days of Trump’s removal from the platform, the composition of the top posts on the platform seemed to shift as “total daily interactions of right-leaning pages significantly dropped after Trump was suspended.” Soon after, Facebook Vice President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg announced that the platform was appealing the decision for review by the Facebook Oversight Board -- a supposedly “independent body” for evaluating Facebook’s decisions to remove certain kinds of content.” Media Matters President Angelo Carusone issued a statement, noting, “Facebook should have permanently banned Donald Trump from its platform a long time ago. The half-measure to suspend him through Inauguration Day was already too little, too late.”

Facebook has often been the subject of political pressure from conservatives who claim that the platform regularly censors the speech of right-leaning figures and organizations, and the platform has repeatedly caved to their demands. But Media Matters has shown that the claims have no basis in reality. In 2018, Facebook submitted to an audit to examine these claims, and the results, released in 2019, show no evidence of conservative censorship. As of August 2020, internal discussions spanning back six months showed that the platform had “relaxed its rules” so right-wing outlets and figures were not disciplined for infringing on the company’s misinformation laws. This was exacerbated in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath, when several right-wing outlets and figures openly circulated self-serving propaganda with minimal repercussions. Before his suspension from the platform, Trump and his campaign were also able to spread dangerous lies in political advertisements without much pushback from Facebook.

January 2019

• The Wall Street Journal reported in January 2019 that Facebook relied on the advice of right-wing groups, including extremists like the virulently anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council, for advice on banning content.

April 2019

• A new study found that “Facebook’s ad delivery algorithm discriminates based on race and gender, even when advertisers are trying to reach a broad audience,” according to The Verge. For example, “Housing ads with a photograph of a white family, for instance, were apparently served to more white users than the same ad with a black family.”

• Popular Information reported that the Trump campaign was using Facebook’s microtargeting features to “mislead and manipulate voters” with seemingly false testimonials. The report led to Facebook taking down the ads as violations of its ad policies. However, “Facebook also admitted that it was not manually reviewing political ads. Instead, it was relying on a computer algorithm.”

• A Media Matters study in April 2019 of 395 political Facebook pages over a 37-week period showed that left-leaning pages and right-leaning pages are earning similar engagement. Right-wing media frequently claim that Facebook censors conservative content on its platform, and Facebook has largely caved to right-wing pressure campaigns to address these baseless claims.

• In April 2019, Facebook added Check Your Fact, an entity associated with the right-wing media outlet Daily Caller, to its fact-checking program. The Daily Caller regularly pushes right-wing misinformation online.

May 2019

• A Media Matters study in May 2019 found that that right-wing sources dominated abortion-related news on Facebook, with anti-abortion misinformation also consistently outperforming all other coverage of abortion-related news. Facebook has largely failed to address abortion-related misinformation on its website -- in one instance, the platform capitulated to right-wing media pressure surrounding a fact check of an anti-abortion group’s post.

August 2019

• A Media Matters study in August 2019 found that Facebook allowed Trump’s Facebook page to run about 2,200 ads referring to immigration as an “invasion” between January and February of that year.

• In August 2019, Media Matters showed that right-leaning pages on average earned more weekly interactions than left-leaning pages on Facebook over the course of a 20-week study -- debunking the right-wing media allegation that conservative content is disadvantaged or censored on the platform.

• On August 20, 2019, Facebook bowed to conservative pressure when it published an interim report of its audit to address baseless allegations of conservative bias on the platform. The report resulted in Facebook changing a particular ad policy that benefited anti-abortion organizations that had been clamoring for the change.

September 2019

• An Axios report revealed that tech companies, including Facebook, were conducting outreach with conservatives and “trying to push hard on data showing that conservative voices often outperform liberal ones.”

• According to Popular Information, Facebook was allowing a Ukrainian network to push “pro-Trump propaganda” on pages posing U.S.-run accounts, with one such page sharing “viral content that reaches more Facebook users than some of the largest media outlets in the United States.” Facebook took down the network after the report came out.

• In September, Facebook confirmed that it treats the content of politicians differently from content of others on Facebook, unless the politicians’ content is “paid advertisements” or “speech that incites violence.” This enables politicians to spread misinformation on the platform with impunity.

October 2019

• In October, however, “Facebook quietly amended its policy on ‘misinformation’ in advertising, allowing it to accept nearly any from a politician.” Facebook clarified to Popular Information “that while ads from politicians and political parties are exempt from fact-checking, political ads by other entities are not exempt.”

• Later in October, Fox News announced that Zuckerberg would sit for an exclusive interview with Fox News’ Dana Perino. The announcement came after reports that Zuckerberg has been secretly meeting with Republican politicians, white nationalists like Fox host Tucker Carlson, and other right-wing media figures.

• In October 2019, Facebook launched its News tab feature and included far-right website Breitbart as one the news publishers included in the feature. Breitbart has a long history of lies and hate, including white supremacist and nationalist content.

November 2019

• In November, NBC News reported that Zuckerberg and board member Peter Thiel had dinner with Trump at the White House in October. The meeting was noteworthy because, among other things, it hadn’t previously been disclosed by either the White House or anyone at Facebook, and there’s no public record of what the trio discussed.

• Facebook’s fact-checking service in the Netherlands quit “over a dispute regarding the social network’s policy to allow politicians to run ads containing misinformation,” according to The Verge.

• A November 2019 report from Media Matters found that abortion opponents have been using Facebook to organize around pressuring municipalities to become “Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn” and ceremoniously but unenforceably ban abortion.

January 2020

• Despite Facebook’s policy that entities like super PACs cannot run ads that contain information debunked by their third-party fact-checkers, Popular Information reported that “Facebook is allowing a major pro-Trump Super PAC, the Committee to Defend the President, to run ads” that claim “former Vice President Joe Biden is ‘a criminal who used his power as Vice President to make him and his son RICH.’”

• NBC News reported that Facebook had hired Jennifer Williams, a former senior producer on Fox & Friends, to head video strategy for Facebook News.

February 2020

• A February 2020 Washington Post report outlined the ways that Facebook has given in to Republican demands out of fear of angering conservatives and Trumpists.

March 2020

• A Media Matters study in March 2020 found that Facebook pages and groups were still spreading disinformation and fearmongering about the census, even though Facebook had removed Trump campaign ads the week before containing census-related disinformation.

May 2020

• Media Matters found that Facebook’s ad policy enabled Trump to use Facebook and Instagram ads to ramp up false allegations of voter fraud. Some of the Trump campaign’s ads that started running on both Facebook and Instagram on May 18 falsely claimed that the “Radical Left is trying to STEAL THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF OUR LIVES.” Media Matters identified at least 529 of these ads, and 267 of them -- more than half -- make various other false accusations against Democrats, including that they are “stuffing the ballot boxes with FAKE and FRAUDULENT votes.”

• In a May 2020 interview with Fox News’ Dana Perino, Zuckerberg chided Twitter for its decision to add a fact check to one of Trump’s tweets containing an unhinged conspiracy theory about rampant voter fraud, claiming it was not something Facebook would do. Zuckerberg later doubled-down on his comments, telling CNBC, “I don’t think that Facebook or internet platforms, in general, should be arbiters of truth.”

June 2020

• In June, a Media Matters study showed that right-wing talking points got the most engagement in Facebook posts about voting, including unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud and attacks on voting by mail.

July 2020

• Popular Information reported in July that Facebook agreed with an earlier report from Popular Information that the right-wing website The Daily Wire’s “undisclosed financial relationship” with “Mad World News, a notorious outlet that exploits fear and bigotry for profit” violated the platform’s rules. Facebook seems to have given the Daily Wire only a warning.

• Media Matters found in July 2020 that Facebook was allowing a dishonest Trump super PAC ad against Biden, claiming he was “caught on the record repeating the N-word, twice.”

• Media Matters also found that Facebook allowed a digitally altered video to spread that purported to show Biden appearing at a dinner with a man in blackface.

• A Media Matters study of interactions (reactions, comments, shares) on published online content about trans topics shared on Facebook found that right-leaning sources earned considerably higher engagement than all other sources combined.

August 2020

• Facebook fired an employee for collecting information on the platform’s bias toward right-wing pages, BuzzFeed News reported. The company and leadership’s tolerance of false information, many times due to external pressure from larger right-wing figures and news organizations, has caused internal unrest within its staff leading up to the 2020 presidential election.

October 2020

• In October, Facebook updated the platform with a feature that boosted public groups into the news feeds of users who don’t follow them and in searches outside of the platform. This “upgrade” enabled a network of pro-Trump public groups to promote right-wing clickbait websites containing misinformation. “That’s where the bubble generation begins. A user enters one group, and Facebook essentially pigeonholes them into a lifestyle that they can never really get out of,” a Facebook engineer told The Verge, calling the move “really dangerous.”

• Leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Trump’s reelection campaign ran thousands of Facebook ads that featured manipulated photos of Biden with edits depicting him to appear older or alleging that he had cheated during the primary debates. Facebook has a policy prohibiting manipulated media and content in political ads that could be misleading, though it clearly does not always enforce this.

• Throughout the four-day Senate hearings to confirm Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, right-leaning Facebook pages garnered more overall interactions than posts from left-leaning or ideologically nonaligned pages, dominating the narratives surrounding the nomination. These pages funneled right-wing talking points into Facebook’s dialogue, dispelling allegations that Facebook censors conservative content.

• Between July 1 and October 13, 2020, Facebook had charged Biden rates nearly $2.50 more for 1,000 impressions per ad than Trump, according to a study conducted by The Markup. Over the course of tens of thousands of advertisements placed, the site noted, “Biden’s higher average price means he has paid over $8 million more for his Facebook ads than he would have if he had been paying Trump’s average price.”

• On October 28, the Senate commerce committee held a hearing about content moderation on social media platforms, giving conservatives an outlet to voice their opinions on the so-called “anti-conservative bias” of social media companies. These claims have no basis in fact, as evidenced by a Media Matters study which found that right-leaning pages regularly outperformed left-leaning pages on Facebook over a nine-month period. Those pages, such as Fox News, Ben Shapiro, and the Daily Mail, consistently earned more average weekly interactions than left-leaning pages in 2020, despite similar engagement rates.

November 2020

• Franklin Graham, the son of the late evangelical leader Billy Graham, used Facebook to promote right-wing narratives and pro-Trump talking points to millions of folowers, garnering massive engagement which sometimes outperformed Trump’s own Facebook. According to a study conducted by Media Matters, Graham earned an average of over 219,000 interactions per post between January 1 and October 18, 2020, and he made half of the top 10 posts on Facebook with election-related links in September 2020, clearly negating accusations of anti-conservative bias on the platform.

• Following the presidential election, Media Matters found that right-leaning pages outperformed left-leaning and non-aligned pages on Facebook. This study also found that Trump’s posts, almost all of which included election misinformation, accounted for “nearly all of the top posts from political pages.”