Will remove outright attempts at voter suppression in US polls: Facebook

Facebook has reiterated that it will pull out everything that attempts at voter suppression and spread misinformation on its platform before the 2020 US presidential election in November.

In an interview with CNN on Sunday, Nick Clegg who is VP of Global Affairs and Communications at Facebook said that the platform will "label any claim by a candidate where they prematurely claim victory".

"Facebook will remove outright attempts at voter suppression. We're now going to do this much more forcefully between now and November the third," Clegg said.

Facebook recently launched a new Voter Information Center as part of the biggest ever voter information campaign in the US, with the goal of registering four million voters.

Earlier this month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the platform will not accept new political ads in the week before the election.

He said that Facebook will remove posts that claim that people will get Covid-19 if they take part in voting.

"Importantly, if any candidate or campaign tries to declare victory before the results are in, we'll add a label to their post educating that official results are not yet in and direct people to the official results," Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post.

The company has announced a new research partnership to better understand the impact of Facebook and Instagram on key political attitudes and behaviours during the US 2020 election.

"The US elections in 2016 exposed the risk of social media being abused to interfere in elections, and misinformation and political polarisation clearly play out on social media platforms too," Clegg said earlier this month.

"To continue to amplify all that is good for democracy on social media, and mitigate against that which is not, we need more objective, dispassionate, empirically grounded research".

--IANS

na/