An Elon Musk-backed political group is posting fake Kamala Harris ads on Facebook

Did you see those Kamala Harris ads on Facebook? Be careful. They might have duped you.

A series of ads that look like they are from the Harris campaign are spreading falsehoods about her current policy positions, including that she wants to institute a mandatory gun-buyback program and give Medicare benefits and drivers’ licenses to undocumented immigrants. One of the ads asserts Harris wants to ban fracking. None of this is true.

The Facebook ads have collectively been viewed millions of times in swing states, posted by an account dubbed “Progress 2028,” a name suggesting a liberal counterpart to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

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

The ad buys are publicly available in an ad library database hosted by Meta, Facebook’s parent company. It shows that so far the group has posted 13 of these ads. As of Wednesday afternoon, Meta tallied the ads as having received 8.7 million impressions, although some viewers may have seen the same ads multiple times.

Experts told NPR that there is nothing illegal about the ads, since the First Amendment protects political speech, even when it contains lies. But the messages have the potential to lead voters astray just days before the election.

“The tactic isn’t new,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, on the strategy of using trickery to smear a political opponent. “Its potential reach and impact are. Social media greatly expanded the capacity of well-financed, skilled ad buyers to micro-target susceptible undecided voters without risking a backlash from those likely to recognize 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 stating the advertisement was “paid for by Progress 2028” fuels the deceit.

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

Meta spokesman Ryan Daniels would not comment directly on the Progress 2028 ads, which were first highlighted by the tech news site 404 Media. But the ads do not appear to run afoul of Meta’s advertising rules, which mostly require that the entity paying for the ad be disclosed. The rules also ban premature claims of victory and ads that question the legitimacy of the election process.

Daniels said deceptive political ads have been deployed “across the media landscape for decades,” adding that Meta’s Ad Library, where the reach of ads can be viewed, “brings a level of transparency to political advertising that far exceeds that of any other platform where these ads have run.”

As it did in 2020, Meta will not allow new political advertisements to be placed the week leading up to the Nov. 5 election, but political ads can still appear on the company’s platforms if purchased before the week of the election.

After Nov. 5, political ads on Facebook and Instagram can resume, which is a change from 2020, when such advertising was banned post-election. Google, meanwhile, will block election ads after Nov. 5 to tamp down any falsehoods that may spread in the event votes are still being counted then.

Weissman says this is not enough. “Meta is disdaining responsibility for permitting this deception, but Meta is 100 percent responsible,” Weissman said. “Yes, there is a First Amendment right to lie, but that does not constrain Meta’s management of advertisements 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 web page, which gives the impression it is a group backing Harris for president, when the opposite is true.

The site states that “when Kamala Harris takes office, we will have a never-before-seen opportunity to enact sweeping reforms that will ensure that equity across every corner of America is finally a reality,” before launching into a series of policy proposals Harris does not in fact endorse in the 2024 race.

Building America’s Future and a consulting group tied to Progress 2028 did not return requests for comment.

Weissman with Public Citizen said mischaracterizing a candidate’s stances is a common political messaging tactic, but outright lies framed as if they are coming from the candidate goes beyond a brazen distortion.

“Whether they are impactful is another question, but they are highly likely to deceive,” he said. “They seem real and the only way to recognize they are not is if you are a highly informed voter who knows the claims are untrue.”