Facebook to ban new election ads in final week
Two months before the presidential election, Facebook is trying to better police political misinformation on its platform, a tacit acknowledgement that the social network is rife with falsehoods that could sway the vote.
The company said Thursday that it will restrict new political ads in the week before the election and remove posts that convey misinformation about COVID-19 and voting. It also will attach links with official results to posts by candidates and campaigns that prematurely declare victory.
“This election is not going to be business as usual. We all have a responsibility to protect our democracy,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on Thursday. “That means helping people register and vote, clearing up confusion about how this election will work, and taking steps to reduce the chances of violence and unrest.”
Activists hailed the new policies but said the onus will be on Facebook to enforce them. And some experts were skeptical that the policies will really make a difference.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a Facebook expert at the University of Virginia, said the company proved once again its incapacity to effectively snuff out dangerous misinformation last week when it failed to remove postings by right-wing militia organizers urging supporters with rifles to converge on Kenosha, Wisconsin.
“Facebook’s biggest problem has always been enforcement,” he said. “Even when it creates reasonable policies that seem well-meaning, it gets defeated by its own scale. So I am not optimistic that this will be terribly effective.”
Facebook and other social media companies are being scrutinized over how they handle misinformation, given problems with President Donald Trump and other candidates posting false information and Russia’s ongoing attempts to interfere in U.S. politics.
Facebook has long been criticized for not fact-checking political ads or limiting how they can be targeted at small groups of people.
With the nation divided, and election results potentially taking days or weeks to be finalized, there could be an “increased risk of civil unrest across the country," Zuckerberg said.
Under the new measures, Facebook says it will prohibit politicians and campaigns from running new election ads in the week before the election. However, they can continue to run existing ads and change how those ads are targeted. And many voters are expected to vote by mail well ahead of Election Day.
Trump campaign spokeswoman Samantha Zager criticized the ban on new political ads, saying it would prevent Trump from defending himself on the platform in the last seven days of the presidential campaign.
Posts with obvious misinformation on voting policies and the coronavirus pandemic also will be removed. Users can forward articles to a maximum of five others on Messenger, Facebook’s messaging app. The company also will work with Reuters to provide official election results and make the information available both on its platform and with push notifications.
After being caught off-guard by Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook, Google, Twitter and other companies put safeguards in place to prevent it from happening again. That includes taking down posts, groups and accounts that engage in “coordinated inauthentic behavior" and strengthening verification procedures for political ads. Last year, Twitter banned political ads.
Zuckerberg said Facebook had removed more than 100 networks worldwide engaging in such interference over the last few years.
“Just this week, we took down a network of 13 accounts and two pages that were trying to mislead Americans and amplify division,” he said. The activity was the work of the Kremlinbacked group known as the Internet Research Agency, which was active in the 2016 presidential campaign.