Bay Area Lawmakers Call Meta’s Content Moderation ‘Inadequate’ Ahead of 2026 Midterms

August 19 2026 Bay Area Lawmakers Call Meta’s Content Moderation ‘Inadequate’ Ahead of 2026 Midterms Home / Media / Uncategorized Originally published on August 19, 2026 by KQED and written by Ella Jackson. Rep. Kevin Mullin, D-San Mateo, sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday raising concerns about Meta’s content moderation policies — including fact-checking rollbacks, the automation of risk review and the spread of content generated by artificial intelligence across its platforms. With a majority of Americans getting at least some of their news from social media, Mullin told KQED he is “deeply concerned” and wants to know how Meta plans to combat deepfakes and manage AI-generated misinformation ahead of the 2026 election. “While Meta is just one company, it runs some of the largest social media platforms in the world: Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp,” Mullin said. “Its decisions have a major impact on what Americans see every single day. American voters have a right to know whether what they are seeing online about candidates and elections is real or fake.” Eighteen lawmakers, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and Rep. Lateefah Simon, D-Oakland, signed the letter alongside Mullin. Generative AI has already impacted political campaigns, according to the letter. A 22-year-old user in India created a fake conservative influencer named “Emily Hart” that espoused anti-abortion and anti-immigration views, and amassed millions of views before Instagram removed the account, Mullin wrote. Ahead of the 2026 midterms, multiple deepfakes have circulated across Senate races in Texas and Georgia, featuring false videos of candidates speaking to the camera. Meta did not respond to KQED’s request for comment. Last week, KQED reported that State Sen. Aisha Wahab, D-Hayward, planned to file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission over interference on social media, including a “surge of suspicious accounts, bot-like activity,” in the race to fill the seat formerly held by Eric Swalwell. “Meta has a responsibility to make sure voters are talking to real people and making decisions based on real information,” Wahab told KQED on Tuesday. “Political campaigns can’t be cyber investigators with the capabilities to figure out whether coordinated fake accounts are manipulating an election. That is Meta’s job.” Daniel Kreiss, a professor of political communication at the University of North Carolina, said that AI has made it cheaper both to produce creative content — like social media videos — and to target that content at key voting blocks using large data sets, including polling data. “Individual bad actors, or collective bad actors, can do a lot more with a lot less,” Kreiss said. This new reality means that Meta has a heightened responsibility to ensure that electoral institutions can function properly, Kreiss continued. “These companies benefit from being in democracies,” Kreiss said. “They have an interest in protecting the very institutions and freedoms that enabled them to become profitable global companies.” While Meta has started flagging the use of AI in advertisements, the platform’s design makes endorsement or sponsorship disclosure more opaque than traditional television ads — ultimately making it more difficult for voters to see what money is behind the speech circulating online. “There’s a massive political influencer economy that takes shape on these platforms that is not disclosed to the public,” Kreiss said. Even though California passed a law requiring content creators to disclose political ads in 2023, these disclosures are difficult to enforce, the Associated Press reported. Users may not always know who is behind the content they’re seeing. Mullin gave Meta until Sept. 18 to respond to nine questions outlined in Tuesday’s letter. He asked the company to report back on a range of questions, from staffing plans and budget for election integrity teams to the company’s current ad disclosure requirements. ###