Mark Finchem, the Republican candidate seeking to oversee Arizona’s election system as that state’s secretary of state, made a last-minute fundraising pitch on Wednesday using one of his favorite talking points: the looming threat of voter fraud.
Finchem falsely argued on Facebook and Twitter that his Democratic opponent, Adrian Fontes, is a member of the Chinese Communist Party and a “Cartel criminal” who has “rigged elections before.”
It wasn’t the first time Finchem spread unfounded election-rigging conspiracy theories on social media. In September, Finchem misleadingly posted that Fontes was being “bankrolled” by billionaire George Soros and former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and they want to “RIG our elections & our voter rolls.”
For years, Facebook and Twitter have pledged to fight falsehoods that could confuse users about America’s electoral system by tagging questionable posts with accurate information about voting and removing rule-breaking misinformation. But this electoral cycle, at least 26 candidates have posted inaccurate election claims since April, but the platforms have done virtually nothing to refute them, according to a Washington Post review of the companies’ misinformation labeling practices.
That’s in contrast to the 2020 election cycle, when Facebook and Twitter collectively added labels to scores of election-related posts from Donald Trump that pointed readers to authoritative information about the electoral process or alerted readers that the information was misleading. Facebook labeled at least 506 Trump posts between Jan. 1, 2020, and Jan. 6, 2021, according to a study from the left-leaning Media Matters for America, and Twitter alsoadded labels to Trump’s tweets questioning the validity of the election or voting process.
But such labels have been nonexistent this election cycle, the Post review showed, when hundreds of congressional seats as well as thousands of state and local positions are being decided.