Network to also ban political ads in final week of
2020 race
Facebook has been condemned for failing to police
propaganda
“This election is not going to be business as usual.
We all have a responsibility to protect our democracy”
Mark Zuckerberg
Tom
McCarthy
@TeeMcSee
Email
Thu 3 Sep
2020 14.19 BSTLast modified on Thu 3 Sep 2020 19.10 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.
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