By Dominic Taylor-
Facebook has announced plans to launch “the largest voting information effort in US history” in the run-up to November’s general election, the company has said, aiming to help 4 million Americans register to vote with a new voting information centre.
“We’ve built some of the most advanced systems in the world to combat election interference,” said Naomi Gleit, Facebook’s vice-president of product management and social impact. “The Voting Information Center will be another line of defence.
By getting clear, accurate and authoritative information to people, we reduce the effectiveness of malicious networks that might try to take advantage of uncertainty and interfere with the election.”
Facebook Inc will also attach labels to political ads shared by users on their own feeds, ending what critics have said for years was a loophole in the company’s election transparency measures.
Facebook, which has attached a “paid for by” disclaimer to political ads since 2018, but the label disappeared once people shared the ads to their own feeds, which critics said undermined its utility and allowed misinformation to continue spreading unchecked.
The move is part of efforts for the social media giant to counteract fake news and political interference, as occurred during the 2016 U.S elections.
“Previously the thinking here was that these were organic posts, and so these posts did not necessarily need to contain information about ads,” said Sarah Schiff, a Facebook product manager overseeing the change.
After receiving feedback, Schiff said, the company now considers it important to disclose if a post “was at one point an ad.”
The company has been under pressure to combat false viral information before the Nov. 3 presidential election, including from presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who last week called on Zuckerberg to reverse his decision to exempt political ads from fact-checking.
In a USA Today op-ed on Tuesday, Zuckenburg officially announced on Wednesday the largest voting information campaign in American history.
”Our goal is to help 4 million people register to vote, he said. As we take on this effort, I want to outline our civic responsibilities:
First, we’re encouraging people to vote. Voting is voice. It’s the single most powerful expression of democracy, the best way to hold our leaders accountable and how we address many of the issues our country is grappling with.
I believe Facebook has a responsibility not just to prevent voter suppression — which disproportionately targets people of color — but also to actively support well-informed voter engagement, registration and turnout.
To achieve this, we’re creating a new Voting Information Center with authoritative information, including how and when to vote, as well as details about voter registration, voting by mail and information about early voting. We’ll also include posts from state election officials and verified local election authorities. We’ll show this center at the top of the Facebook News Feed and on Instagram to make sure everyone gets a chance to see it”.
Zuckenburg said his organisation has a responsibility to protect the integrity of the vote itself. In 2016, we were slow to identify foreign interference on our platform.
Since then, we’ve built some of the most advanced systems in the world to protect against election interference — investing billions of dollars in technology and hiring tens of thousands of people to work on safety and security. We’ve learned from this experience and have protected against interference in more than 200 elections around the world”