As part of its effort to strengthen its platform against threats in the 2020 election, Facebook will try to emerge precise information on the vote in a new place - on the posts of politicians.
Starting today, the Facebook posts of federal officials and elected candidates - including presidential candidates - will be accompanied by an information label that invites anyone who sees the post to click for official information on how to vote. The label will link to usa.gov/voting. For posts that specifically address voting by post, the link will link to a section of the same website with state-by-state instructions on how to register to vote through the post.
Facebook plans to expand the voting information label to be applied to all voting posts in the United States, not just to federal-level political figures. This plan remains on track for launching by the end of summer with Facebook's Votot Center, its previously announced information hub for verified official information related to the 2020 elections. Voter information center, such as coronavirus information center Facebook launched in March, will be positioned prominently to channel users to useful resources.
The company did not mention any specific reason for the decision to prioritize elected officials before other users, but Facebook was criticized in May for its decision to allow false statements by President Trump on mail voting systems and the 2020 elections to remain on the platform intact. At the time, Twitter added its voting information label to the same posts, which also appeared as tweets from the president's account.
In a June post, Mark Zuckerberg discussed concerns about suppressing voters, saying that Facebook would "tighten" its content policies that mislead voters "to reflect the reality of the 2020 election." Facebook will also focus on removing false statements on polling stations in the 72-hour period preceding the election. Zuckerberg said seats with misleading information that could intimidate voters would be banned, using the example of a post falsely claiming that ICE officials are verifying documentation in a particular polling station.
Zuckerberg made no specific mention of President Trump's false claims that voting in the mail enlarged in the light of the coronavirus crisis would be "substantially fraudulent" and would result in "rigged elections". Zuckerberg said Facebook would start labeling some "noteworthy" posts from political figures, leaving the content online but adding a label noting that it violates the platform's rules.
While false statements by political figures are cause for concern, they do not account for most of the misinformation of the vote on the platform. A new ProPublica report found that many of Facebook's most effective voting posts contained misinformation. "Of the top 50 posts, ranked by total interactions, which mentioned voting by mail from April 1, 22 contained false or substantially misleading statements about the vote, particularly about voting by mail," writes ProPublica in the report, noting that many of the posts seem to break Facebook's rules on disinformation voting but remain without labels or other contextualization.
While its past executive decisions remain controversial and often disconcerting, it appears that Facebook is rethinking those choices and preparing its efforts in light of the upcoming U.S. elections. For Facebook, which sometimes self-destructs to project an aura of political neutrality, it is less about extending the control of the facts and making the correct and verified voting information at hand and readily available to users.
In early July, Facebook announced an election campaign that aims to register 4 million new U.S. voters. As part of this effort, Facebook sent a pop-up information window to app users in the United States to remind them to register to vote, check their registration status with links to official state voter registration sites. These notifications will soon appear on Instagram and Messenger as part of the same push to mobilize voters.
Apparently Facebook is also reflecting on the idea of banning all political advertising ahead of November, a decision that would likely alleviate at least one of the company's headaches at the cost of leaving both political parties, who rely on Facebook's ads to reach voters, frustrated.
