Last week, Meta announced that it is allowing former President Donald Trump back on its social media platforms, along with promising that there will be “new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses.” However, a new study from Media Matters shows that the company struggled to combat election misinformation in 2022, even before letting the leader of the election denial movement back on its platforms.

Media Matters previously found that right-leaning news and politics pages on Facebook earned over 60.5 million interactions on more than 65,000 election-related posts in 2022. Now, further analysis has found that more than 10,000 of those posts, which earned nearly 10.4 millions interactions, also mentioned Trump, and many contained or amplified election misinformation, including from Trump and right-wing outlets. 

Meta has long claimed that it removes and prevents the spread of misinformation on its platforms, but Media Matters and others have repeatedly reported that the company has continuously struggled to control the spread of false claims about election fraud. And now, Meta is reinstating Trump, despite his propensity to push election misinformation on his own social platform Truth Social.

Along with announcing Trump’s reinstatement, Meta promised that it would have “new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses,” and Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, reiterated that the company would “take action to restrict the circulation” of violative posts. But it has been reported that Meta also clarified that “posts attacking 2020 will be allowed, but posts attacking 2024 are a different story” — a policy that ignores Trump’s posting patterns on Truth Social and is unlikely to prevent him from sharing election misinformation on the platform.

Meta’s failures with election misinformation in 2022 show that the company is unprepared for the barrage of misinformation that Trump will undoubtedly post on its platforms.

Half of the top 20 election-related posts from right-leaning pages amplified conspiracy theories

In 2022, right-leaning news and politics pages on Facebook earned over 60.5 million interactions on over 65,000 election-related posts. Out of the 20 election-related posts that earned the most interactions, half amplified election fraud conspiracy theories either directly or implicitly. 

The top 3 election-related posts from right-leaning pages contained claims of election fraud, with the top post sharing a cartoon that claimed that Biden’s presidential election was “fixed overnight.” Two of the top 20 election-related posts had authoritative labels from Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers, with one (from Dan Bongino) marked as false information and another (from ForAmerica) marked as missing context.

Of these 10 total posts that reference election fraud, 4 make reference to the debunked conspiracy theory promoted in Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2000 Mules, including the second and third most popular posts. 

More than 10,000 of the election-related posts from right-leaning pages also discussed Trump, including posts that directly quoted his election misinformation 

Using CrowdTangle, Media Matters identified more than 10,000 election-related Facebook posts that were from right-leaning news and politics pages and also mentioned Trump. These posts earned nearly 10.4 millions interactions.

Of these posts, 5 of the 20 posts with the most interactions contained election misinformation. These 5 posts contained rhetoric about “corrupt elections,” claims of issues with mail-in ballots, and a link to a film which claims that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg rigged the 2020 election against Trump. Two of the posts also directly amplified Trump's own false election claims.

Additionally, the top 20 posts included one from Breitbart that promotes D’Souza’s 2000 Mules film. Further analysis of the 10,000 election-related posts about Trump identified over 150 posts that referenced the 2000 Mules film.

In addition to amplifying Trump, many of the posts included links to right-wing media outlets. Nearly 80% of the 10,000 election-related posts about Trump contained links. Notably, over 1,100 of the posts linked to The Western Journal, nearly 500 linked to The Daily Wire, and over 300 linked to TheBlaze. These 1,900 posts earned nearly 700,000 interactions.

Methodology

Using CrowdTangle, Media Matters compiled a list of 1,773 Facebook pages that frequently posted about U.S. politics from January 1 to August 25, 2020.

For an explanation of how we compiled pages and identified them as right-leaning, left-leaning, or ideologically nonaligned, see the methodology here.

The resulting list consisted of 651 right-leaning pages, 476 ideologically nonaligned pages, and 470 left-leaning pages.

Every day, Media Matters also uses Facebook's CrowdTangle tool and this methodology to identify and share the 10 posts with the most interactions from top political and news-related Facebook pages.

Using CrowdTangle, Media Matters compiled all posts for the pages on this list that were posted from January 1, 2022, through December 31, 2022, and were related to elections. We reviewed data for these posts, including total interactions (reactions, comments, and shares).

We defined posts as related to elections if they had any of the following terms in the message or in the included link, image text, article headline, or article description: “2,000 mules,” “2000 mules,” “two thousand mules,” “two-thousand mules,” “ballot,” “ballots,” “vote absentee,” “absentee ballot,” “absentee ballots,” “absentee vote,” “absentee voter,” “absentee voters,” “absentee votes,” “contest results,” “contesting results,” “election,” “elections,” “count the votes,” “count votes,” “counting votes,” “dominion,” “drop box,” “drop boxes,” “dropboxes,” “dumped vote,” “dumped votes,” “extra vote,” “extra votes,” “hack machines,” “hacked machines,” “hacking machines,” “illegal votes,” “illegal voting,” “intimidating voters,” “konnech,” “mail election,”“mail in vote,” “mail in votes,” “mail in voting,” “mail voting,” “mail-in vote,” “mail-in votes,” “mail-in voting,” “missing vote,” “missing votes,” “non-citizen voting,” “noncitizen voting,” “pole challenger,” “pole challengers,” “pole watcher,” “pole watchers,” “pole worker,” “pole workers,” “poll challenger,” “poll challengers,” “poll watcher,” “poll watchers,” “poll worker,” “poll workers,” “polling location,” “polling locations,” “polling place,” “polling places,” “polling site,” “polling sites,” “polling station,” “polling stations,” “rigged,” “stealing votes,” “stolen vote,” “stolen votes,” “stop the steal,” “stopthesteal,” “tabulating,” “tabulation,” “tabulator,” “tabulators,” “tail gate parties,” “tail gate party,” “tailgate parties,” “tailgate party,” “vote as late,” “vote count,” “vote dump,” “vote dumping,” “vote dumps,” “vote fraud,” “vote late,” “vote scam,” “voter fraud,” “voter ID,” “voter identification,” “voter intimidation,” “voter registration,” “voter scam,” “voter suppression,” “voting as late,” “voting late,” “voting location,” “voting locations,” “voting machine,” “voting machines,” “voting place,” “voting site,” “voting sites,” “voting station,” “voting stations,” “2022 midterm,” or “2022 midterms.”

Additionally, we compiled election-related posts for the pages on this list that were posted from January 1, 2022, through December 31, 2022, and also mentioned “Trump” in the message or in the included link, image text, article headline, or article description.

Further, we compiled election-related posts for the pages on this list that were posted from January 1, 2022, through December 31, 2022, and also mentioned Trump and 2000 Mules. These posts included “Trump” and had one of the following terms in the message or in the included link, image text, article headline, or article description: “2000 mules” or “2,000 mules.”