A new report from a leading digital accountability watchdog has uncovered a dramatic surge in violent and abusive content targeting U.S. elected officials on Facebook, directly tied to Meta’s 2025 rollback of key content moderation safeguards. The non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) published its findings Tuesday, detailing how loosened platform rules have created a far more hostile environment for lawmakers across the political spectrum.
To reach its conclusions, the CCDH analyzed nearly 8 million public Facebook comments mentioning 100 sitting members of Congress, comparing activity across two six-month periods: before and after Meta enacted its controversial policy changes last year. The data tells a stark story: violent threats against lawmakers — including explicit calls for assassination — quadrupled, overall harassment more than doubled, and rates of racist and gendered abuse against officials also saw significant spikes.
Notably, the report also documented a sharp rise in content inciting violence against former President and current President-elect Donald Trump following the policy shift, including one comment that explicitly claimed Trump “deserves a bullet through his head.” Threats grew against lawmakers from both major political parties, underscoring the broad reach of harm created by reduced oversight.
Imran Ahmed, chief executive officer of the CCDH, emphasized the broader systemic risk of Meta’s policy choices. “When platforms stop enforcing their own rules against threats, hate, and harassment, they become complicit in normalizing intimidation and harassment of elected officials,” Ahmed said. “The result is a culture where violence feels easier to justify and radicals feel empowered.”
Meta pushed back against the findings in an official statement. A spokesperson for the Palo Alto-based tech giant noted that the company regularly publishes public reports tracking the prevalence of violating content on its platforms, and claimed “the prevalence of hateful conduct did not increase throughout 2025.” The spokesperson added that the company had not received the CCDH report ahead of its publication, and therefore could not directly address the watchdog’s specific claims.
The CCDH’s investigation comes in the wake of two high-profile policy changes Meta rolled out in early 2025. First, the company eliminated its network of professional U.S. fact-checkers, shifting the task of debunking viral misinformation to a user-driven “Community Notes” system modeled after the approach adopted by Elon Musk on platform X. This move was widely interpreted as an effort to appease the incoming Trump administration, whose conservative base has long argued that mainstream platform fact-checking disproportionately censors right-wing speech. Meta also rolled back longstanding speech restrictions related to gender and sexual identity, a change that sparked widespread alarm from LGBTQ+ advocacy groups.
The trend of rising threats against U.S. public officials predates Meta’s policy changes, but the watchdog’s findings suggest the company’s choices have amplified an already dangerous crisis. In 2024, Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot and killed in a politically motivated attack. Just months ago in April, a shooting near the Washington Hilton during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — which Trump was attending — forced the former president to be evacuated, marking one of dozens of high-profile security incidents targeting public officials in recent years.
Utah Republican Senator John Curtis called the report’s findings deeply alarming in a statement provided to the CCDH. “When companies reduce oversight in areas like violence, hate, and harassment, it should not be any surprise to see those harms increase,” Curtis said. “Similarly, the reported surge in abusive and threatening content directed at public officials is deeply concerning, particularly in light of recent events.”
Global fact-checking organizations have already warned that Meta’s policy shift could have catastrophic consequences if expanded beyond U.S. borders. The International Fact-Checking Network has noted that Meta’s current fact-checking program operates in more than 100 countries, and rolling back that infrastructure globally would leave communities worldwide vulnerable to rampant misinformation around public health, elections, and violence. AFP, one of the largest participants in Meta’s global fact-checking partnership, currently collaborates with the program across 26 languages, serving regions including Asia, Latin America, and the European Union.