David Bowens, director of elections in Durham County, North Carolina — one of the most populated areas of the swing state— received an email in July notifying him that a Facebook post containing voting misinformation was going viral, CNBC reported.
The post seemed to be written by an authority figure and urged voters to request new ballots if a poll worker or anyone else wrote on their form, claiming that this would render the forms invalid. This is not true.
Similar false information spread rapidly on Facebook during the 2020 election. However, at the time the platform would flag the content as “false information,” and link to a story that debunked the rumor. That no longer appears to be the case, according to CNBC.
“It was spreading and there wasn’t anything happening to stop it until our state put out a press release and we started engaging with our constituency on it,” Bowens told the outlet.
Indeed, the viral post that Bowen was notified about by a former precinct official included nothing to suggest it was misinformation. The North Carolina State Board of Elections had to flag the post itself, warning voters that false “posts have been circulating for years and have resurfaced recently in many N.C. counties.”
The board also took to Facebook to correct the record, urging users to “steer clear of false and misleading information about elections.” That post has garnered eight comments and 50 shares as of Wednesday, CNBC noted. In the meantime, the original false claim continues to be shared by users in North Carolina, Mississippi, and New Jersey.
The apparent failure to tackle election misinformation comes as Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook parent company Meta, has been publicly ingratiating himself to Republicans who had previously criticized him for providing grants to county election offices in 2020, which they falsely claimed was a partisan endeavor.
At a recent congressional hearing, Zuckerberg said he regretted taking down misinformation about COVID-19 at the request of the federal government, promising that he would not do so again, The New York Times reported.