Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) said in a video published Saturday that none of the country’s social media platforms have committed to removing “information that is inaccurate about voting or candidates,” calling that “very scary.”
The Arizona Democrat made the remark while describing her own trouble telling AI-generated video from real footage, saying people forward her AI clips she cannot recongize as AI.
Grijalva claimed the problem traces back to President Donald Trump’s first term.
“I think it’s the spin of misinformation that is very scary because Trump started the very first time, Trump 1.0, he started with this idea that the media was fake and has continued to build upon that,” Grijalva said.
She then described being unable to identify AI content that her children spot immediately.
“Like people will forward them to me and I’m like, and I’m looking at them and my kids are behind me going, ‘That’s AI.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know,’” she said.
The congresswoman pivoted to social media platforms’ policies on political information in the same comment.
“None of our social media platforms have committed to taking off information that is inaccurate about voting or about candidates,” Grijalva said. “That’s very scary.”
She also argued that fewer outlets provide objective coverage, claiming that any outlet with an opinion gets dismissed as “the liberal media.”
Grijalva signed a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg twelve days before the video was published. The August 17 letter faulted Meta for ending its third-party fact-checking program and rolling back automated systems that scan for and remove certain content, quoting Zuckerberg’s acknowledgment that the change would mean the company “catch[ing] less bad stuff.”
The letter asked Zuckerberg to disclose how long Meta takes to remove AI-generated political content across Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, and how much content the company has taken down since January 2025 compared with the two prior years. Reps. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) also signed it. They want responses by September 18.
Google told House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) last year that “senior Biden Administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach,” pressing the company to censor coronavirus-related user content when it “did not violate its policies.” In a letter to Jordan, the company agreed to restore creators it had removed over coronavirus and election-integrity rules.
The Democrat Party’s own rapid-response account posted AI-fabricated audio of “Donald Trump Jr.” last year claiming the United States “should’ve been sending weapons to Russia,” then deleted it without a retraction. It was archived at 23,000 views.
