Facebook will prevent foreign meddling in US election
The US Presidential election this November will be unlike any other. America was deeply divided long before the events of the last few months, but the pandemic and the protests against racial injustice that followed the senseless killing of George Floyd have raised the political temperature to boiling point.
What happens in America has a huge knock-on effect on the rest of the world. It promises to be a heated campaign; and it will play out on social media. This means Facebook is under the spotlight as never before – and rightly so. In the absence of government regulation, it has to decide for itself how to approach the complex issues around elections and social media. What Facebook does during this election not only affects the integrity of American elections, it has implications for the rest of the world too.
Elections have changed – and so has Facebook. As a company, it has looked hard at what went wrong with Russian interference in the 2016 elections and made some big changes. There are now three times as many people working on safety and security issues – more than 35,000 in total – and we work closely with government and law enforcement. Facebook has helped fight interference in more than 200 elections since 2017 and reduced fake news on its platform by more than 50 per cent, according to independent studies. Facebook also prevents millions of fake accounts from being created every day and takes down coordinated networks of malicious accounts.
Anyone who wants to run political ads has to be authorised. Between March and May, Facebook stopped more than 750,000 political ads targeting the US from running because the advertiser hadn’t completed the authorisation process. We will also block all ads in the US during the election period from state-controlled media organisations in other countries. All political ads must have a “paid for by” disclaimer attached to them – a label which will remain on the ad even if it is shared – and information on which voters are being targeted by the ads, and how many saw them, is logged in an ads library for everyone to see. This provides a level of transparency far greater than anything that existed at the time of the last US election or the Brexit referendum – and it exceeds the transparency of political ads in print or broadcast media.
Facebook believes in free expression and the right of voters to hear what politicians are saying so they can be held to account. That doesn’t mean politicians can say whatever they like – the line is drawn at speech that will cause imminent harm or suppress voting, and no one is exempt from that. Many people disagreed with the decision to allow President Trump’s recent posts to stay up. It wasn’t taken lightly – and I’m certain it won’t be the last controversial one between now and November.
But if people don’t like what Mr Trump or any other politician is saying, the best response is not to censor them but to vote. One of the most important things Facebook can do in this election is to make sure people can find accurate information about how and where to cast their ballot. Even that is not uncontroversial – voter registration is much more politically loaded in the US than it is in the UK. Facebook has already been doing something similar during the Covid-19 pandemic – connecting billions of people to accurate health information from experts. Now we are going to do the same with voting.
Facebook helped more than 335,000 voters register ahead of December’s UK election. Today we are announcing that we will be displaying a US 2020 Voting Information Center at the top of American users’ Facebook and Instagram feeds. It will be a one-stopshop for authoritative information about registration deadlines, options to request postal votes and more. Reaching millions of voters between now and the election, it will be the largest voting information effort ever launched in America.
And people who just want some peace and quiet – those who don’t like political ads on Facebook and Instagram – can now choose to turn them off so they do not appear in their feed. This is not just happening in the US but globally, too, from the autumn.
This work is never finished. As online campaigning techniques evolve, platforms like Facebook must stay one step ahead. Where social media companies draw the line between free expression and content control will always be controversial, especially as politics itself becomes more polarised. But we have built many new tools so that we can play a responsible role in the conduct of elections – and empower voters to make judgments for themselves.