Facebook Says It Mistakenly Blocked GOP Senate Candidate’s Ad About Protecting Women’s Sports

Facebook admitted Tuesday that it mistakenly removed an ad from Michigan Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers that called to keep men out of women’s sports.

The Rogers campaign told The Daily Wire that the ad — which slams Rogers’ opponent, Rep. Elissa Slotkin, for supporting trans-identifying men competing against women — was posted to Facebook last Friday before Meta took it down. With just around two weeks until the election, the Rogers campaign repeatedly tried to post the ad, but it was removed by the social media platform three more times over the weekend.

According to the Rogers campaign, Facebook’s parent company initially said the ad was removed for “Unacceptable Business Practices,” but then clarified that the ad was removed “incorrectly” by the tech giant’s “automated review systems.” The ad hits Slotkin over her support for the Equality Act, which seeks to allow boys to play in girls’ sports.

Rogers re-posted the ad — which was made by the political action committee, Michigan Victory Committee — on X Monday, writing, “Time and again, big tech activists at Facebook have REMOVED our ad exposing Slotkin’s failures to protect our daughters. Biological men should not compete in women’s sports. This is about FAIRNESS for our daughters and privacy for women.”

“Thankfully, people like @ElonMusk believe in free speech and that voters deserve to know the truth,” Rogers added.

BREAKING: Time and again, big tech activists at Facebook have REMOVED our ad exposing Slotkin’s failures to protect our daughters. Biological men should not compete in women’s sports. This is about FAIRNESS for our daughters and privacy for women.

Thankfully, people like… https://t.co/M5WuqyjlPH

— Mike Rogers (@MikeRogersForMI) October 21, 2024

A Meta spokesman confirmed in a statement to The Daily Wire that the removal “was an error and the ad was restored.” The tech giant has increasingly relied on artificial intelligence (AI) for content moderation, especially after the COVID pandemic and vaccine rollout. In 2021, Meta announced a new AI system “that can adapt more easily to take action on new or evolving types of harmful content faster.”

“Harmful content continues to evolve rapidly — whether fueled by current events or by people looking for new ways to evade our systems — and it’s crucial for AI systems to evolve alongside it. But it typically takes several months to collect and label thousands, if not millions, of examples necessary to train each individual AI system to spot a new type of content,” Meta said at the time. “To tackle this, we’ve built and recently deployed Few-Shot Learner (FSL), an AI technology that can adapt to take action on new or evolving types of harmful content within weeks instead of months.”

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In the final week of the 2024 campaign, Meta “will also block new political, electoral and social issue ads” while allowing ads “that have previously run before this restriction period.”

“Our rationale for this restriction period remains the same as it has since 2020: in the final days of an election, we recognize there may not be enough time to contest new claims made in ads,” Meta said.

Rogers has recently gained ground on Slotkin, trailing by just 2.1 points as of Tuesday afternoon, according to the RealClearPolitics average.