Don’t Believe Everything You See on Facebook This Election Cycle

As election day nears, Facebook feeds are filling up with content from political advocacy groups and candidates. These posts and ads appear to inform, but is what they claim fact or spin?

Partisan and non-partisan advocacy groups run ads and post election content across Facebook. On Sept. 29 the non-partisan group We Make Indiana used Facebook to livestream an in-person forum featuring five county office candidates on the Nov. 3 ballot. As ABC57 reported, data centers, the mental health crisis and environmental issues were among the concerns addressed during the event.

We Make Indiana is one of many entities vying for your attention across Facebook this election cycle. Political ads about taxes, crime, utility costs and the candidates themselves pop up in feeds between family and friends’ posts. On Oct. 1, a search of Meta’s ad library, filtered to Indiana and “issues, elections or politics,” returned 426 individual ad records, 10 of which focused on five of the candidates running for county offices.

Because showing up on Facebook doesn’t make an ad’s claim true, how are you supposed to know what’s fact and what’s not? A few minutes and the right tools can help you check a claim, even the ones that require more digging than others.

Ads Can Mislead Without Being False

An ad, by its very nature, is meant to persuade. Political ads aren’t any different and can contain accurate information and still leave out context that would change how readers understand it.

According to PolitiFact’s fact-checking methodology, political ad claims may include:

Completely true information
Outright false information
Opinion or hyperbole that cannot be independently verified
Real statistics and quotes presented without full context

As of Oct. 1, the Logan Foster Redress South Bend Facebook Page was running a sponsored ad paid for by Redress South Bend, a website that calls itself an independent news outlet. The ad promotes Redress’s Sept. 23 article that quotes St. Joseph County assessor candidate Vic Cummings writing, “I do drink&drive!” The article linked in the sponsored ad includes screenshots purportedly of Cummings’s personal Facebook page with several posts centered around drinking and driving and marijuana use. However, these posts are from 2010. According to Cummings’s Vote411 candidate profile, he graduated Clay High School in 2006, only four years before the alleged posts. The ad text claims that the posts were still public as of Aug. 13. The St. Joe Current could not find the posts on Cummings’s Facebook page as of Oct. 5. The St. Joe Current reached out to Redress South Bend for comment, but as of publication, has not received a response.

The ad is also an example of what a paid political ad presenting as news might look like. If you are unsure about the validity of an ad such as this, click through the “Sponsored · Paid for by” link to get more information about the source.

Facebook ad data show that this ad was displayed 2,000 to 3,000 times since it began running on Sept. 28.

Why This Matters

Indiana secretary of state candidate Democrat Beau Bayh is running a Facebook video ad claiming that his Republican opponent, Max Engling, “…became a millionaire while working in Congress where he traded tech stocks and profited from data centers.” According to a Sept. 24 Indiana Capital Chronicle article, Engling has held three congressional staff positions: from 2011-2019 in the House Committee on House Administration; from 2019-2023 as an aide to then-Rep. Kevin McCarthy; and beginning in 2025 as central Indiana regional director in Sen. Jim Banks’ office. Engling is currently on leave from Banks’ office while campaigning in the secretary of state race.

As of Oct. 5, Meta’s Ad Library reports that the ad had been displayed to Facebook users 800,000 to 900,000 times since it began running on Sept. 21.

Asked to substantiate the allegations in the ad, Bayh’s campaign provided Engling’s personal financial disclosure dated Feb. 14, 2024. In the filing, Engling reported unearned income and assets valued between $1,193,016 and $2,696,000, including between $15,000 and $50,000 in stock in Nvidia, a technology company that designs chips used in data centers. The stock was purchased before Jan. 1, 2023, while Engling was a congressional staffer.

This issue extends beyond the state, too. A poll released Sept. 9 by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 43% of 1,036 U.S. adults surveyed said it was difficult to tell whether candidates’ statements were true. A Pew Research Center survey of 9,680 U.S. adults conducted in September 2024 reported that 52% said it was hard to determine what was and wasn’t accurate when viewing election coverage, and 28% said it had been difficult to find reliable information about the presidential election.

The problem with misinformation in ads isn’t new; however, the way Facebook handles ads is. So, what changed?

Facebook Changed Its Policy

Meta’s former policy used third-party U.S. fact-checkers, a group of independent people who assessed potentially false content, to debunk inaccurate claims shared by a politician or advocacy group. While it didn’t remove the ad, it would show it to fewer users. Under Meta’s former U.S. policy, independent fact-checking organizations rated posts and ads, often ones Meta’s systems or users had flagged as possibly false. When they rated a post false, Meta showed it to fewer people and attached a notice pointing to the fact-check. When they rated an ad’s content false or misleading, Meta refused to run it.

By 2018, Meta exempted candidates’ and officeholders’ own posts and ads from fact-checking. If a politician shared someone else’s article, photo or video that fact-checkers had already debunked, Meta demoted it and kept it out of ads. Ads from PACs and advocacy groups not tied to a candidate got no such exemption.

Following the 2024 election, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company was ending its use of third-party U.S. fact-checkers accusing them of exercising personal political bias. The statement said, “As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable.”

The alternative Meta offered was Community Notes, a feature that allows users to provide context to a post or make corrections when the information is wrong. The caveat is that users can’t write Community Notes on ads. An ad can still be reported if it violates Meta’s rules, but this doesn’t guarantee Facebook will remove it.

Can Facebook Be Held Responsible for Misinformation?

In 1996, Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a provision that says an “interactive” computer service provider, such as Facebook, can’t be treated as the publisher or speaker of the information provided by someone else.

Federal law protects Meta from being held legally responsible for what users produce and post on its platform. Section 230 doesn’t protect the person or group that creates unlawful content, including an advertiser. However, the law does carve out exceptions for federal criminal law, intellectual property, communications privacy and specified sex trafficking claims.

How Can You Tell Whether an Ad Is Accurate?

When an ad appears in your feed, here are some things to watch for and steps you can take to verify any claims it makes.

Outdated Statistics and Information

Some ads recycle old statistics, quotes and voting records. Say, a candidate may have voted for a data center four years ago, but then voted against data centers twice in the past two years. An ad that cites only the first vote tells the truth but still misleads. Statistics, photos and quotes can be true and irrelevant at the same time, as in the case of the Redress South Bend ad against Cummings.

Opinion Versus Fact

Separate opinions from factual claims. Broad statements about candidates not performing their jobs aren’t necessarily lies, just value statements. Pay attention when an ad makes a factual claim, such as a hypothetical statement saying a candidate “voted three times to approve data centers.” This is a specific claim you can check. In some instances, ads contain links to sources. While this can be helpful, going outside of the advertiser and Meta for the answers might give you more accurate information.

Use Reliable Sources

Google is not a source, but a tool to find them. It can lead to better information, but it can also surface the same misinformation in ads. Some of the best websites for nonpartisan fact-checking are below:

Start by searching a phrase from the ad or a claim it makes. Read the source material, check the date and compare the ad’s claims with the original records. If you cannot verify a claim, it does not establish whether it is true or not.

As the Nov. 3 election draws near, check political claims you come across on Facebook before sharing them. But not every ad or political post spreads misinformation. Get into the practice of weighing every statistic, quote and assertion made in these ads. The goal isn’t to distrust everything you see on Facebook but to recognize when a claim deserves a second look.