Facebook to Block New Political Ads a Week Before Election Day
Facebook is expanding its policies to guard against voter suppression. This is the latest development.
(Bloomberg) -- Facebook Inc. is expanding its policies to guard against voter suppression and removing a wider swath of misleading posts ahead of the 2020 U.S. election. The company also said it will block campaigns from submitting new ads in the week leading up to Election Day on Nov. 3, preventing candidates from posting uncontested messages ahead of the vote.
The changes are part of a broader update on Facebook’s election strategy, which was outlined Thursday in a post by Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg. The CEO is particularly worried about election night uncertainty, when there may be hours or days between the polls closing and the announcement of valid results. “There’s a greater chance of civil unrest and violence after the election,” he told CBS in an interview aired Thursday.
Facebook will add labels to posts from politicians who try to claim victory before official results, Zuckerberg wrote. The labels will direct users to accurate updates compiled by Reuters. “There’s nothing illegitimate about taking a few extra days or even weeks in order to make sure all the votes get counted,” Zuckerberg added.
The social network already removes explicit misinformation about voting, such as posts that suggest people would still be able to vote on the day after the election. But now the company said it will also remove posts that include implicit misinformation, like claims that anyone with a driver’s license gets a ballot.
Facebook plans to highlight its voting information center, a dedicated section of the service where Americans can register to vote and learn more about the process, atop users’ Facebook and Instagram pages almost every day between now and Nov. 3, a company spokesman said.
The Menlo Park, California-based company has made combating misinformation and manipulation around the 2020 U.S. election a top priority. It’s keen to prove to users, politicians and regulators that it can police its platform and avoid a repeat of 2016, in which Russian operatives exploited the service on behalf of then-Republican candidate Donald Trump against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Facebook announced this week that it removed a small network of pages and accounts tied to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the main group behind much of the disinformation and meddling from 2016.
Facebook’s voter suppression and political ads policies have been targeted by critics who believe they don’t go far enough to protect the vote. A third-party auditor found that Facebook did not enforce its own voter suppression policy against President Trump after a series of posts he shared in May misrepresented how a number of states were handling mail-in ballots.
The expanded policies and enforcement around the election will not be enacted retroactively, a company spokesman said, and may not change how Facebook handles Trump’s posts.
Among Facebook’s policy changes, the company will start labeling, but not removing, posts that aim to “delegitimize the outcome of the election” by making unfounded claims about, for example, fraudulent results. The distinction between a post that aims to delegitimize the poll and one that includes implicit misinformation about voting is not entirely clear, which may prove problematic given the different enforcement mechanisms for each.
Zuckerberg wrote that Facebook’s block on campaigns submitting ads in the week ahead of the election was motivated by the shortage of time for competitors or journalists to combat misleading claims that close to the vote. “If someone is kind of dumping some new information, if it’s misinformation the last days of the election, then there may not be time for that normal kind of debate and process to play out,” Zuckerberg told CBS.
Facebook has previously considered a number of changes to its political ads policy, which stipulates that the company will not fact-check ads from politicians or their campaigns. One idea discussed was a full ad blackout in the days or weeks ahead of the vote, Bloomberg first reported in July. But Zuckerberg has pushed back publicly in the past on the idea of removing political ads entirely, saying he doesn’t think it should be Facebook’s job to censor politicians. Even though Facebook will not accept new ads a week before the election, campaigns will still be allowed to run existing ones.
The heads of the Democratic House and Senate campaign committees criticized Facebook, saying the changes announced Thursday didn’t do enough to combat misinformation. “Facebook’s last-minute changes will not prevent disinformation from being shared organically and will still allow political campaigns to run ads with lies,” U.S. Representative Cheri Bustos of Illinois and U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada said in a joint statement.
The Trump campaign was also upset. “Only ONE special group is exempt from this ban,” wrote Gary Coby, the Trump campaign’s digital directo. “The Liberal Corp Media.”
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