In recent months, US lawmakers have condemned Facebook for harming children’s health, amplifying violence from Washington to India, and disseminating misinformation surrounding COVID-19 and its vaccine. The criticisms follow a leak of thousands of internal company documents known as the Facebook Papers, which reveal that despite knowledge of its products’ role in fueling a range of toxic behaviors, Facebook has refused to take any meaningful action in response, putting its profits before social health.

Yet while lawmakers are exploiting the leak’s political fallout to ramp up ongoing attacks on the tech giant, taxpayers might also be interested to know that the US government has funded programs to assist opposition political parties and activists in using Facebook to undermine foreign governments. Venezuela is a case in point.

Following the death of Socialist former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, the National Democratic Institute — an independent arm of the US government created to fund and support political parties abroad in a more formal manner than the Central Intelligence Agency — funded members of the Venezuelan opposition to use the social media giant to mobilize their supporters and draw followers of the Socialist government “across the aisle.” We recently received US government documents from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that illustrate how the government developed a program focused on using Facebook to assist the Venezuelan opposition in municipal elections in 2013 and legislative elections in 2015. The documents show, in other words, that the US government is actively using social media to meddle in other countries’ elections.