Ruben Gallego advertises on Facebook despite calling Mark Zuckerberg a liar

Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) has blasted Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a liar, but his newly announced Senate campaign is already spending ad money on the platform.

The Arizona Democrat announced Monday that he was running for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by newly independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, and a Raw Story review of data provided by Facebook's political ad disclosure database shows Gallego's campaign had spent at least $7,000 on ads right out of the gate.

"Kyrsten Sinema used her power to stop Democrats from raising the minimum wage, expanding voting rights, lowering the cost of medicine, and protecting abortion access," states one of Gallego's ads, which began running Monday morning. "Now it’s our turn to use our power to defeat her. Contribute to Ruben Gallego’s campaign today."

Gallego and Zuckerberg were students together at Harvard when Facebook was created, and the lawmaker has challenged the tech mogul's claim that Iraq War protests inspired the social media platform.

“I remember feeling that if more people had a voice to share their experiences, maybe things would have gone differently,” Zuckerberg said at Georgetown University in October 2019. “Those early years shaped my belief that giving everyone a voice empowers the powerless and pushes society to be better over time.”

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Gallego, an Iraq War veteran who claims to have been one of the site's first 2,000 users and has advertised on the platform for years, disputed Zuckerberg's assertion.

“He’s rewriting history so it gives him an excuse to regulate himself,” Gallego said in response. “It’s false. It’s completely false.”