As the only major social media company allowing political ads ahead of the midterm elections, Meta is letting right-wing politicians and organizations seemingly violate its advertising policies by running dozens of ads with misinformation that has been rated false by the platform’s third-party fact-checkers.

Despite its failure to secure its platforms during the 2020 elections, Meta has already rolled back several of its election protection measures and transparency tools leading up to the 2022 midterms. The company will be repeating its 2020 measure prohibiting new political ads in the week before Election Day to allow “additional time for scrutiny of issue, electoral, and political ads.” While new ads cannot be created during this restriction period, Meta notes that if an ad earns any impressions (the number of times the ad appeared on users' screens) “before the restriction period goes into effect, candidates running for office and other organizations can continue running these ads through the restriction period to share their closing arguments and mobilize voters.”

Meta’s advertising policies state that the company does “not allow advertisers to run ads that contain content that has been debunked by third-party fact-checkers, including content rated false, partly false, altered or missing context.” But in advance of Meta’s restriction period, Media Matters has identified at least 36 ads about social issues, elections, or politics created in 2022 containing claims...