Social media giants Meta and X failed to take down far-right hate speech adverts on their platforms, in an apparent bid to influence election outcomes in Germany, an investigation has revealed.
A report by corporate accountability group Ekō revealed that it submitted ten adverts to social media networks Meta and X this month, which openly targeted immigrants and Muslims in an attempt to imitate and garner attention from those involved in Germany’s far-right and extremist movements.
With the adverts submitted between 10-14 February, they were made in the German language and were geo-restricted to Germany, calling for various extremist ideas including imprisoning and gassing immigrants, burning mosques and equating immigrants to animals and germs, along with AI-generated images of scenes such as “immigrants crowded into a gas chamber and synagogues on fire”.
According to the investigation, Meta approved half of those adverts within 12 hours while X scheduled all of them for publication. Before those adverts went live, however, Ekō’s researchers cancelled and removed them in order for them not to be seen by users and the target audience.
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Through the social media networks’ approval of those advert submissions, the investigation found that they directly went against laws preventing hate speech in the European Union, with both X and Meta’s platforms of Instagram and Facebook being signatories to the EU Code of Conduct on countering illegal hate speech online under the bloc’s Digital Services Act.
Aside from inciting far-right and extremist sentiment and potential attacks against those such as immigrants and Muslims, the approval of such adverts concern many who believe that apparent bias could potentially impact the outcome of elections throughout Germany. That was particularly the concern for the latest Bundestag election over the weekend, which saw the far-right Alternative For Germany (AfD) party gain significant ground throughout the country, especially in its east.
According to the news outlet Euractiv, a spokesperson for Meta said: “None of them [the adverts] were published and our systems detected and disabled the advertiser’s page before we became aware of this research. Our ads review process has several layers of analysis and detection, both before and after an ad goes live.” They added that Meta and its platforms “continue to invest significant resources to protect elections.”
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