Just a few days before the election, ads full of misinformation are booming on Facebook

Several recent media investigations have found that false and misleading election advertising was being spread on Facebook just days after the election, in apparent violation of parent company Meta's policies.

The results largely come from searching the Meta Ad Library, a transparency tool that allows anyone to see who placed a particular ad and approximately how much they paid Meta to run it. The company founded the library after the 2016 election, when Facebook first ran into trouble for allowing election misinformation to thrive on the platform.

The Washington Post and NPR reported this week that an Elon Musk-backed, pro-Donald Trump political group ran ads deceptively designed to appear to come from the Harris campaign. To Facebook users, the ads appear to come from a group called Progress 2028 – a name that sounds like a left-wing response to the right-wing Project 2025.

In reality, the ads were run by the Musk-funded group Building America's Future and contain several falsehoods about the political plans of Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris. Among them are suggestions that she wants to allow undocumented immigrants to vote and enroll in Medicare, enforce mandatory gun buybacks and ban fracking – none of which are true.

The group has spent more than $680,000 on ads since launching last month, and more than $350,000 last week. According to Meta's data, the ads were shown millions of times to users in seven swing states.

Meta did not immediately respond to HuffPost's inquiries about whether these ads violated the company's election misinformation policies, but spokesman Ryan Daniels defended Musk's running of ads for the Post.

“This type of political advertising is not new and has been occurring across the media landscape for decades,” he said, arguing that Meta’s transparency regarding ad purchases “far exceeds that of any other platform on which these ads have appeared .”

Musk, contacted through Tesla, did not immediately respond when asked if he was aware of the content of those ads. HuffPost also contacted X for comment.

Musk spent tens of millions to elect Trump.

Another alarming finding comes from Forbes, which reported Thursday that Meta made more than $1 million by running a buyer's ads containing misinformation about the Harris campaign. Some of the ads, many of which ran last week, falsely claim that the upcoming election could be manipulated or postponed by Democrats.

One of the ads, which appears to show an AI-generated depiction of Harris cheering while the American flag waves behind her, asks: “Was the 2024 presidential election just postponed?” Click below to learn how the Harris-Walz campaign plans to use an 1866 law to prevent Trump from seizing power even if he wins the election.” The ad warns that this “could mean the end of democracy as we know it”.

The ads appear on a site called The Tech Prophet, owned by Nevada-based Pro Health Digital LLC. Most of the ads point to a website run by fringe economist and conspiracy theorist Jim Rickards, as Forbes first reported.

The Audience tab on this advertiser's page, which provided information about spending and where ads appeared, was missing.

Meta told Forbes that it “reviews the ads and removes any ads that violate our policies.”

ProPublica also reported on the phenomenon on Thursday, saying it had identified eight fraudulent meta-ad operations controlling more than 340 Facebook pages, at least some of which were hacked by public figures. The investigation found that the groups placed more than 160,000 ads on election and social issues.

Some of the ads use fake video and audio files of government officials – a practice banned by Meta – to trick users into sharing their private information. Some of them are sold and used to con people out of their money, ProPublica found.