OAKLAND, California (AP) – As of Thursday, U.S. Facebook users Posting voting articles can begin to see an appendix to their publications, from labels that direct readers to reliable data about the upcoming presidential election.
It is the most recent step of the social network in the fight against incorrect information related to elections on its platform in the run-up to the November 3 elections, a step in which many voters can mail ballots for the first time. Facebook began adding similar links to in-person and mail-in-mail posts about voting through federal politicians, adding President Donald Trump in July.
These tags will be connected to a new voter data center to COVID-19 which, according to Facebook, has been noticed through billions of users worldwide. The labels will say, “Visit the Electoral Information Center for election resources and official updates.”
Despite these efforts, Facebook continues to face widespread complaints about its handling of incorrect information about elections and other issues. The company has refused to audit politicians’ announcements, for example, and a two-year audit of its civil rights practices accused the company of abandoning the U.S. election “exposed to interference from the president and others seeking to use incorrect information to sow confusion. and suppress the vote.
The effectiveness of these tags will depend on Facebook’s ability to synthetic intelligence formula to identify posts that want them, said Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Civic Media Center. If each and every message containing the word “vote” or “vote” gets a data link, he says, “people will start ignoring the links.”
“This is an exclusive election and an exclusive election season,” he said. “Certainly, we have never had elections or a global pandemic.”
Other generation companies, Twitter and Google, which own YouTube, have made similar efforts around the November election. Twitter said it seeks to expand its policies to address “new and exclusive challenges” similar to this year’s election, adding incorrect information about the vote by mail.
The corporate did not deliver the main points of potential threats, but said that an extended voting procedure where the effects are not transparent “has the possibility of being exploited to sow distrust of the election result.”
“We plan to combat this factor through the Voting Information Center and the summary of U.S. elections on Facebook News to ensure that others have simple access to the latest news and authorized data about election night and beyond,” Naomi Gleit, vice president of product control and social impact, wrote in a blog post.