Elon Musk-backed group posts fake Kamala Harris ads on Facebook: NPR

Have you seen these Kamala Harris ads on Facebook? Be careful. They could have deceived you.

A series of ads that look like they came from Harris' campaign spread falsehoods about her current policy positions, including claims that she wants to implement a mandatory gun buyback program and provide Medicare benefits and driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants. One of the ads claims Harris wants to ban fracking. None of this is true.

The Facebook ads received millions of total views in swing states and were posted by an account called “Progress 2028,” a name that suggests a liberal counterpart to “Progress 2028.” Heritage Foundation Project 2025.

But there is no such Harris-affiliated initiative as Progress 2028. And the ads are funded by Building America's Future, a dark-money group funded by billionaire Elon Musk and others. after to campaign tracking site Open Secrets. It's part of it more than $100 million Musk spent money to help former President Donald Trump's re-election, campaign finance records show.

The ad buys are publicly accessible in an advertising database hosted by Meta, Facebook's parent company. It shows that the group has run 13 of these ads so far. As of Wednesday afternoon, Meta counted that the ads had received 8.7 million impressions, although some viewers may have seen the same ads multiple times.

Experts told NPR that there was nothing illegal about the ads because the First Amendment protects political speech, even if it contains lies. But the messages have the potential to mislead voters just days before the election.

“The tactic is not new,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said of the strategy of using tricks to denigrate a political opponent. “Its potential reach and impact are. Social media has greatly expanded the ability of well-funded, sophisticated ad buyers to target vulnerable undecided voters without risking backlash from those likely to detect the deception.”

Robert Weissman, co-president of the nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen, said that in this case, the disclosure at the bottom of the ad that the ad was “paid for by Progress 2028” compounds the deception.

“It truthfully discloses who is paying for the ad, but this company sounds like a Harris support organization when it is not,” said Weissman, who has called on Meta to remove the ads.

Meta spokesman Ryan Daniels declined to comment directly on the Progress 2028 ads highlighted first from tech news site 404 Media. But the ads don't seem to conflict Meta advertising ruleswhich usually require disclosure of the company paying for the ad. The rules also prohibit premature claims of victory and advertisements that question the legitimacy of the electoral process.

Daniels said deceptive political advertising has been “used across the media landscape for decades,” adding that Meta's ad library, which allows viewing the reach of ads, “brings a level of transparency to political advertising that far exceeds that of all other platforms on which these ads were displayed.”

As in 2020, Meta will not allow New political ads will run the week before the Nov. 5 election. However, political ads can still run on the company's platforms if purchased before election week.

After November 5th, political ads on Facebook and Instagram can resume. This represents a change from 2020, when such advertising was banned after the election. Google, meanwhile, will block election advertising after November 5th to limit any falsehoods that could spread if the votes are still counted then.

Weissman says that's not enough. “Meta denies responsibility for allowing this deception, but Meta is 100 percent responsible for it,” Weissman said. “Yes, there is a First Amendment right to lie, but that does not limit Meta’s management of advertising on its platform.”

Open Secrets found that Progress 2028 also sent text messages to potential voters making false claims about Harris' policy positions, with a link to the Progress 2028 website, giving the impression that it was a group that Harris for president, even though the opposite is true.

The website states, “When Kamala Harris takes office, we will have an unprecedented opportunity to enact sweeping reforms that will ensure that justice finally becomes a reality in every corner of America,” before offering a series of policy proposals that Harris doesn't actually make support in the 2024 race.

Building America's Future and an advisory group affiliated with Progress 2028 did not respond to requests for comment.

Public Citizen's Weissman said misrepresenting a candidate's stance is a common political communications tactic, but outright lies phrased as if they came from the candidate are more than a blatant distortion.

“Whether they are effective is another question, but it is very likely that they are deceptive,” he said. “They appear to be real, and the only way to know this is to be a well-informed voter who knows the claims are untrue.”