MIT’s professor accuses Google, Facebook for false info on DR Congo’s election

Recently, Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook is recently being accused of violating Vietnam's new cybersecurity law. Now one of the professors of Cambridge-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is accusing both Google and Facebook for promoting false information on their platforms about the presidential elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In a post on Medium (via Daily Nation, BBC), Ethan Zuckerman shared screengrabs of advertisements on the two platforms (Google and Facebook) declaring Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, the ruling party's candidate, as the winner. The electoral commission said provisional results of last week's election were delayed because less than half the ballots had arrived.

"So why are ads on Google and Facebook, apparently targeted towards internet users in DRC's neighbor, Congo-Brazzaville, declaring Emmanuel Shadary to be DRC's new president?" Ethan Zuckerman questioned in the post.

"Facebook and Google's powerful ad systems may be being used to reinforce election fraud, either by targeting these ads to Brazzaville or to DRC itself, where a small number of people are still on the internet," Zuckerman opined. He said that he is collecting similar images so that "we can ask Google and Facebook to prevent the transmission of false information that could be used to cement a stolen election," sources noted.