Facebook says it will flag any Trump effort to
declare premature victory
Network to also ban political ads in final week of
2020 race
Facebook has been condemned for failing to police
propaganda
Tom
McCarthy
@TeeMcSee
Email
Thu 3 Sep
2020 14.19 BSTLast modified on Wed 23 Sep 2020 11.00 BST
Trump announced on the first day of the Republican
national convention last week that any election that he did not win would be
invalid.
Facebook
plans to flag any attempt by the Trump campaign to declare a premature victory
in the presidential race on the platform, the company announced on Thursday.
The social
media giant, which has come in for heavy criticism for failing to police
foreign and domestic elections propaganda on its network, also said it would
not accept any new political ads in the final week of the 2020 presidential
race.
Facebook
did not single out Trump in its announcement that it would label posts by any
campaign that tries to declare victory before the final election results are
in.
But Trump’s
opponent, Joe Biden, has shown no intention of declaring premature victory and
has never challenged the integrity of US elections, while Donald Trump
announced on the first day of the Republican national convention last week that
any election that he did not win would be invalid.
“The only
way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election,”
Trump told cheering Republican party officials at the convention.
Trailing
badly in the polls, Trump has kept up a constant attack on the integrity of the
upcoming presidential election for months, focusing on the expanded use during
the coronavirus pandemic of mail-in voting.
The use of
vote-by-mail means that the tabulation of election results in some swing states
could take days or even weeks to complete, which could strike many Americans as
highly unusual, the 2000 Florida recount notwithstanding.
Critics of
Trump fear that if the president appears to be leading in close races in swing
states at the end of election day, he will declare victory, then not back down
from that declaration even if final election results show him to have lost.
Facebook,
an essential tool for many Americans in political organizing and
information-sharing, but also in the past a clearinghouse for rumors and
falsehoods about politics and the conduct of elections, said it would flag
premature declarations of victory and refer users to official Reuters election
results.
Facebook
said the ban on new ads in the final week of the election was designed to
prevent campaigns from airing false charges at such a late stage in the race.
The company said it would also remove posts that convey misinformation about
Covid-19 and voting.
But hours
after Facebook announced the news, Trump posted instructions on Facebook for
his supporters potentially to commit voter fraud by voting twice, saying they
should mail in their ballots then go to their polling places on election day.
Facebook added a label to the post saying “voting by mail has a long
trustworthiness in the US” – but failing to note that double voting is
fraudulent and illegal.
“This
election is not going to be business as usual. We all have a responsibility to
protect our democracy,” the Facebook chief, 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.”
The news
emerged as Axios reported that some big technology companies – Facebook, Google,
Twitter and Reddit – had been “holding dry runs to game out election day chaos
scenarios”. The companies are meeting regularly with one another, with federal
law enforcement and with intelligence agencies to discuss potential threats to
election integrity, the report said.
This election
is not going to be business as usual. We all have a responsibility to protect
our democracy
Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook
has been criticized in the past for refusing to factcheck political ads and for
not doing more to prevent false ads from being targeted at small online
populations who might be most vulnerable to the content or crucial to an
election.
An example
of the kind of political disinformation that continues to circulate on Facebook
came from Trump’s own lips earlier this week, when in an interview with the Fox
News host Laura Ingraham, the president said the federal government was
investigating a plane “almost completely loaded with thugs, wearing these dark
uniforms, black uniforms with gear”.
The fantasy
was traced to a viral, and false, Facebook post published on 1 June.
Zuckerberg
said the company had worked to remove accounts exhibiting “coordinated
inauthentic behavior”.
“Just this
week, we took down a network of 13 accounts and two pages that were trying to
mislead Americans and amplify division,” he posted.
But in May
Zuckerberg told Fox News that the company should step away from regulating
online speech.
“I just
believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything
that people say online,” Zuckerberg told Fox News. “Private companies probably
shouldn’t be, especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position
of doing that.”
Zuckerberg
was dragged to testify before Congress in 2017 after investigators determined
that Russian propagandists had used targeted ads on the network and other
techniques to influence the 2016 election. Zuckerberg at the time claimed
ignorance of widespread foreign efforts, but it was later revealed that he was
warned personally about Russian propaganda efforts by Barack Obama.
Internal
emails later showed that Facebook employees were aware as early as 2015 of
large data-scraping efforts on the platform that were used by the Cambridge
Analytica firm to build “psychographic” profiles to target voters.
In June,
Facebook moderators wrote an open letter in support of virtual walkouts to
protest against Zuckerberg’s refusal to take down posts by Trump that many
believed breached the site’s policies on incitement of violence. Zuckerberg
said the company would review its policies.
Facebook's long-awaited oversight board to launch
before US election
Body will be able to overrule some content moderation
decisions and plans to be ready to hear user appeals next month
Julia
Carrie Wong in San Francisco
@juliacarriew
Email
Thu 24 Sep
2020 14.00 BSTLast modified on Thu 24 Sep 2020 14.53 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/sep/24/facebook-oversight-board-launch-us-election
The long-awaited Facebook Oversight Board, empowered
to overrule some of the platform’s content moderation decisions, plans to
launch in October, just in time for the US election.
The board
will be ready to hear appeals from Facebook users as well as cases referred by
the company itself “as soon as mid- or late-October at the very latest, unless
there are some major technical issues that come up”, said Julie Owono, one of
the 20 initial members of the committee who were named in May, in an interview
on Wednesday.
“The board
is paying attention, and is, of course, aware of the worries around this
election and the role that social media will play,” said Owono, who is also the
executive director of the digital rights organization Internet Sans Frontières.
“When we launch, we will be ready to take requests, wherever they come from,
and from whoever they come from, as long as it’s within our mandate.”
The launch
will come at a time of intense scrutiny and pressure for the company that has
lurched from controversy to controversy since it was used by Russia to
interfere with the 2016 US presidential election. The consequences of
Facebook’s failures in addressing hate speech and incitement, which have for
years been linked to violence in several countries and ethnic cleansing in
Myanmar, have become increasingly apparent in its home country in recent
months. During a summer of civil unrest in the US, Facebook was linked to the
growth of the violent Boogaloo movement and a militia’s “call to arms” on the
night two Black Lives Matter protesters were shot and killed in Kenosha,
Wisconsin.
The limits
of the oversight board’s mandate have been a key point of controversy since the
independent institution was proposed by Facebook’s chief executive, Mark
Zuckerberg, in 2018. The board’s initial bylaws only allowed it to consider
appeals from users who believe that individual pieces of content were unfairly
removed, prompting criticism from experts, including Evelyn Douek, a lecturer
at Harvard Law School who studies online speech regulation.
“We were told
this was going to be the supreme court of Facebook, but then it came out more
like a local district court, and now it’s more of a traffic court,” Douek told
the Guardian. “It’s just been steadily narrowed over time.”
Crucial
areas where Facebook exercises editorial control include the algorithms that
shape what content receives the most distribution; decisions to take down or
leave up Facebook groups, pages and events; and decisions to leave certain
pieces of content up.
The board
would be considering “leave up” decisions as soon as it launched, Owono said,
but only if Facebook referred a case to it. She said technical and privacy
challenges had delayed the launch of a system for Facebook users to appeal
“leave up” decisions, but that one would be available “as soon as possible”.
Facebook’s
decisions to leave certain content up, such as its decision not to remove a
post by Donald Trump threatening Black Lives Matter protesters that “when the
looting starts the shooting starts”, have become as controversial, if not more
so, than its decisions to take certain content down.
Owono said
“checks and balances are needed everywhere”, including across the aspects of
Facebook not included in the oversight board’s mandate, and she expressed some
optimism that the institution was “agile” enough to change and adapt. Her own
concern over Facebook’s “inaction” on hate speech and incitement was a major
factor in her decision to join the board, she said.
“The
unwillingness to deal with these problems is leading increasingly to
governments around the world, particularly in Africa, saying that to curb
incitement to violence, they need to cut off the internet entirely,” she said.
“For me it was important to be part of an institution that would be able not
only to say whether or not Facebook’s decisions are in line with their
community standards and international law, but also whether Facebook’s inaction
is, because we will be able to look at content takedown but also content left
up.”
Asked
whether she agreed with Facebook’s decision to leave the Trump
“looting-shooting” post up, Owono demurred, noting that the board at the time
had been in its earliest stages. When Owono was asked for her personal opinion,
a PR representative interjected to refer to a statement the board issued at the
time, which noted that the board had significant work to do before it could
begin considering cases.
That work
has included making sure all board members are fully versed in Facebook’s
community standards and international human rights law and getting technical
training on the case management tool that will allow board members to receive
and consider the appeals, Owono said.
The tool
was built by Facebook engineers with considerable input from oversight board
members, according to a person familiar with the matter. One detail requested
by the board members was to format user-submitted appeal statements with line
numbers, so they will look similar to legal filings. At launch, it will be
available in 18 languages, though that number includes both US and UK English
and two types of Spanish.
Owono said
she wanted to ensure that the board’s work and decisions reflected both the
diversity of Facebook’s users and the “diversity of the impact and where those
impacts are occurring”, noting that a large majority of Facebook’s users are
outside of the US.
“There will
be many other elections at the end of 2020 in which the role of platforms will
also be scrutinized and should be scrutinized as well,” Owono said, including a
general election in Myanmar on 8 November. “If we receive requests related to
these elections, we’ll also pay the same attention and make the decisions that
are being asked from us thoroughly and in accordance with international law
principles.”
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