Harris presses Facebook over census misinformation

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) is pressing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over how the social media giant intends to handle census-related misinformation after Facebook allowed President Trump’s reelection campaign to run misleading advertisements about the important demographics survey this week.

In a letter to Zuckerberg on Thursday, Harris criticized Facebook for “failing” to enforce its own policies barring misinformation about the U.S. census. Harris, who recently dropped out of the Democratic presidential race, posed a series of questions around how Facebook plans to combat census misinformation in the future.

“I hope you recognize that Facebook’s ability to effectively combat misinformation during the 2020 census will presage your ability to combat similar misinformation during the upcoming elections,” Harris wrote.

Harris is only the latest Democrat to slam Facebook for running the misleading Trump ads, which redirected users searching for the “Official 2020 Congressional District Census” to the Trump campaign website. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday slammed the social media giant over the ads, which were first reported by political newsletter Popular Information.

“This is, on the part of Facebook, a robust unacceptable interference in the census,” Pelosi said at a press conference Thursday.