Meta continues to aid right-wing political interests in weaponising its algorithms to spread hate-filled propaganda around the world. Increasingly, it has been engaged in dodging national regulation through the deployment of targeted lobbying campaigns.
The world’s largest social media company, Meta is the parent of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger. Combined, these products have nearly four billion users – the same number of people estimated to be voting worldwide in 2024. The company’s scale, and its corporate behaviour, have led some to call it “a foreign state, populated by people without sovereignty, ruled by a leader with absolute power.”
Meta’s algorithms can quite literally alter humanity’s perceptions of reality. Its revenue model exploits trillions of personalised data points to deliver highly effective advertising to its users. That has made it a perfect target for data breaches seized on by authoritarians and an ideal vessel for right-wing political parties to spread propaganda around the world. Violent, far-right militias in the US use Facebook to recruit new members. In Germany, the far-right AfD used Facebook to stoke anti-immigrant hatred and position itself for unprecedented success in June’s European parliamentary elections.
Meta’s facilitation of far-right propaganda is not limited to the global north. Right-wing organisers used Facebook to build support for an attempted coup in Brazil following elections. In India, it approved ads during the country’s 2024 elections that targeted opposition politicians and explicitly called for violence against Muslims. In Ethiopia, Meta was aware that it was being used by ethno-nationalists to fan violence as civil war loomed and did little to stop it.
As a platform for anti-democratic manipulation and as a monopoly, Meta has made itself the target for government lawsuits and regulatory action. But many question whether a company that often behaves like a state will allow itself to be regulated by democratic governments. Last year, for example, it retaliated against the government of Canada for passing legislation that would support local journalism by shutting down distribution of news on Facebook.
While Meta bows to authoritarian censorship orders in places like Turkey, it prefers to avoid government intervention altogether, especially in electoral democracies. It ran a secret global lobbying campaign to prevent government regulation on data privacy that targeted political leaders from Malaysia to the UK. In 2023, it spent €8m in lobbying the European Union,more than any company in any industry.
Meta also uses subcontracting to undermine democracy at work and insulate it from responsibility to workers. In Kenya, union-busting has been the norm at one of the company’s content moderation subcontractors. In Germany, another Meta subcontractor reprimanded a whistleblower who testified before the parliament about his working conditions. In updating its corporate Workplace chat platform, Meta flaunted the ability of employers to ban words like “unionise,” earning swift rebukes from trade unions everywhere.
As one investor warned, “Only fundamental changes to [its] business models can reduce the risk to democracy” and until then “Facebook remains a threat to the powerless around the world.”
