(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) A member of Meta’s oversight board said during a recent interview that the Big Tech company “had not done enough” to control users’ speech back in 2020, even though it did everything possible to radically change the outcome of the last presidential election and enforce its censorship tactics after that.
Board member Pamela San Martín claimed in a Wired interview that was published on Jan. 26, 2024, that as the tech platform enters 2024, “even though we’re addressing the problems that arose in prior elections as a starting point, it is not enough.”
“Between the U.S. election [in 2020] to the Brazilian election [in 2022], Meta had not done enough to address the potential misuse of its platforms through coordinated campaigns, people organizing or using bots on the platforms to convey a message to destabilize a country, to create a lack of trust or confidence on electoral processes,” she said.
However, as previous years showed, the Big Tech company was doing everything in its power to change the results of the 2020 election and shut up every dissenter by censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story, removing Donald Trump’s campaign ad, suspending his Facebook and Instagram accounts, and making sure that everyone who thought that the 2020 election was stolen wouldn’t be able to express his views, the Federalist reported.
Despite all of that, San Martín still thought that it wasn’t enough.
“Social media platforms need to learn from past mistakes to be able to address them better this year,” she said.
San Martín then listed other censorship techniques that Meta already tested out in “different countries” and plans to use in 2024. Among them are “working with electoral authorities, adding labels to posts that are related to elections, directing people to reliable information, prohibiting paid advertisement when it calls into question the legitimacy of elections and implementing WhatsApp forward limits.”
She then acknowledged “how [Meta’s] own algorithms, their newsfeeds, their recommendation systems, their political ads can play a part” in the “protection” of “electoral processes,” adding that she wants to see more of it, not less.
