Facebook says false flag election ads don’t break its rules

A shady political group that has previously received money from Elon Musk is running Facebook ads that appear to be from Kamala Harris supporters while promoting things the vice president doesn’t actually support. The ads are misleading to say the least, but a new report from the WashingtonPost makes it clear that Facebook is aware of the deception in the ads and doesn’t mind it.

The Facebook ads are clearly an attempt to anger and energize Republicans by claiming that Harris supports things like a ban on gasoline-powered cars, the complete abolition of U.S. borders and mandatory gun buyback programs. The ads also falsely claim that Harris wants to ensure that undocumented immigrants are registered to vote.

“The Biden-Harris DOJ Successfully Challenged and Won Virginia’s ‘Non-Citizen’ Voter Expungement Program!” says one of the advertisements. “This will ensure that no undocumented immigrant is wrongfully removed from the voter rolls.”

The Facebook ads are made to look like they come from a group called ‘Progress 2028’, a play on the Project 2025 of the Heritage Foundation– the action plan if Donald Trump can regain power. The ads even read “paid for by Progress 2028” when Facebook users see them in their feed. But he says the group Progress 2028 is fake Open secrets. The actual organization running the ads is a dark money group called Building America’s Future, which receives donations from Elon Musk, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal. And Facebook doesn’t seem to find this a problem.

A spokesperson for Meta, which owns Facebook, highlighted the company’s transparency efforts since the 2016 election, in which Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.

“This type of political advertising is not new and has been seen in the media landscape for decades,” Ryan Daniels told Gizmodo by email. “By adding a disclosure label and making ads publicly available in our Ad Library, Meta is bringing a level of transparency to political ads that far exceeds any other platform on which these ads have appeared.”

Of course, Facebook isn’t the only medium where political groups try incredibly shady tactics without any transparency. For example, Building America’s Future is also running its false flag campaign via text messages Pennsylvania. But it’s the fact that Facebook users only see a fake name like Progress 2028, without any clue as to which organization is actually behind it, that poses a real problem.

Musk has become quite an influential figure in the political world in recent years. He began throwing millions at right-wing political groups in 2022 and even created his own political action committee, America PAC, to help get Trump and other Republicans re-elected. Musk, whose companies have benefited from billions of dollars in government contracts and subsidies, will head a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) if Trump retakes the White House.

However, it is unclear how often Musk gives money to so-called dark money groups like Building America’s Future, which are not required to disclose their donors. Musk’s donations to the group only became public earlier this month thanks to an article in the Wall Street Journalshowing that Building America’s Future has ties to Republican consultants Phil Cox and Generra Peck.

Gizmodo tried to reach Elon Musk through his companies Tesla and X, but received no response. We will update this post if we hear back.