Facebook has said it will flag all “newsworthy” posts from politicians that break its rules, including those from US President Donald Trump.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg had previously refused to take action against Mr Trump’s posts suggesting that postal voting will lead to voter fraud, saying that people deserved to hear unfiltered statements from political leaders. Twitter, by contrast, put a “get the facts” label on them.
“The policies we’re implementing today are designed to address the reality of the challenges our country is facing and how they’re showing up across our community,” Mr Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page announcing the changes.
Mr Zuckerberg said the social network is taking additional steps to counter election-related misinformation. In particular, the social network will begin adding new labels to all posts about voting that will direct users to authoritative information from state and local election officials.
Facebook is also banning false claims intended to discourage voting, such as stories about federal agents checking people’s legal status at polling stations. The company also said it is increasing its enforcement capacity to remove false claims about local polling conditions in the 72 hours before the US election.
Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Centre for Civic Media, said the changes are a “reminder of how powerful Facebook may be in terms of spreading disinformation during the upcoming election”.
He said the voting labels will depend on how good Facebook’s artificial intelligence is at identifying posts to label.
“If every post that mentions voting links, people will start ignoring those links. If they’re targeted to posts that say things like ‘Police will be checking warrants and unpaid traffic tickets at polls’ – a classic voter suppression disinformation tactic – and clearly mark posts as disinformation, they might be useful,” he said.
But Mr Zuckerman noted that Facebook “has a history of trying hard not to alienate right-leaning users, and given how tightly Mr Trump has aligned himself with voter-suppressing misinformation, it seems likely that Facebook will err on the side of non-intrusive and ignorable labels, which would minimise impact of the campaign.”
Earlier, shares of Facebook and Twitter dropped sharply after the the giant company behind brands such as Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and Dove soap said it will halt US advertising on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at least until the end of the year.
That European consumer product maker, Unilever, said it took the move to protest against the amount of hate speech online. Unilever said the polarised atmosphere in the United States ahead of November’s presidential election placed responsibility on brands to act.
Shares of both Facebook and Twitter fell by roughly 7% following Unilever’s announcement.
The company, which is based in the Netherlands and Britain, joins a raft of other advertisers pulling back from online platforms. Facebook in particular has been the target of an escalating movement to withhold advertising dollars to pressure it to do more to prevent racist and violent content from being shared on its platform.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here