Elon Musk has once again accused Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms Inc. META of using “election integrity” as a guise for censorship.
What Happened: Musk’s comments came in response to a CNBC interview with Meta’s President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg, where he revealed that the company has around 40,000 employees working on “safety and integrity,” with a budget of $20 billion over the years.
Clegg said, “We have around 40,000 people working on safety and integrity on our platforms,” adding, “We spend all about $20 billion in recent years on things like election integrity, about $5 billion in the last year alone.”
Musk, in response to the post, commented, “‘Election Integrity’ at Meta is just their word for censorship.”
Why It Matters: This is not the first time Musk has criticized Meta’s censorship practices.
In January last year, Musk stated that it constituted a breach of the constitution when addressing the post featuring emails revealing assurances from the Mark Zuckerberg-led company to the White House.
The emails in question indicated that Meta was censoring content deemed “often true” yet not containing actionable misinformation while also discouraging vaccines.
However, in May 2023, Musk, Musk, who has often positioned himself as a vocal advocate for free speech, became embroiled in a contentious dispute over Twitter’s censorship practices. The tech billionaire acquired the social media platform for $44 billion in October 2022.
When people started questioning the hypocrisy of his actions and statements, the tech mogul pushed back saying, “Please point out where we had an actual choice and we will reverse it.” He was referring to reports about Twitter yielding to censorship demands made by authoritarian governments.
Meanwhile, Meta’s censorship practices have been a subject of concern for a while. In September, Meta’s Twitter-like app, Threads, faced criticism for blocking standard search terms, limiting its real-time engagement and user appeal.
This latest revelation about the company’s substantial investment in “election integrity” further fuels the ongoing debate about the true nature of Meta’s censorship practices.
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