Facebook announced on Friday that it will tag all posts of “journalistic interest” made by politicians who break its rules, including those of President Donald Trump.
Social network CEO Mark Zuckerberg had refused to take action against Trump posts hinting that voting by mail would lead to electoral fraud, arguing that the public deserved to hear unfiltered statements from leaders. politicians. Twitter, by contrast, placed a “data verification” tag on these posts.
“The policies that we are implementing today are designed to address the reality of the challenges that our country faces and how they show up in our community,” Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook account.
Zuckerberg said the social network is taking additional steps to deal with the disinformation related to the elections. Specifically, the company will begin affixing new labels to all poll posts that will direct users to authoritative information from state and local election officials.
Facebook will also ban false claims intended to discourage voting, such as stories about federal agents reviewing legal status at polling places. The company also said it will increase its surveillance capacity to remove false claims about local voting conditions 72 hours before the United States election.
Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Civic Media Center, said the changes are “a reminder of just how powerful Facebook can be in terms of spreading false information during the upcoming election.”
He noted that the voting labels will depend on how good Facebook’s artificial intelligence is at identifying which posts to mark.
If they put tags on “every post that mentions voting links, people will start to ignore those links. If they’re targeting posts that contain things like ‘The police will be reviewing court orders and unpaid traffic tickets at the centers,’ a classic voter suppression tactic, and clearly branding those posts as disinformation, that could be helpful. ” he commented.
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