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Facebook prohibits the dissemination of false information on voting conditions and will also carry out "factual checks of violence or long queues at polling stations" as part of the preparation of the mid-term elections of 2018, Reuters reported on Monday.
Facebook's general policy is not to remove false or misleading information that circulates on the platform as such; they hate to invite partisan indignation and are generally reluctant to ban content that does not go beyond outright incitement. They use methods such as deleting pages deemed spammy or engaging inauthentic behavior. It also uses fact checkers (though they often claim to be overloaded and under-supported) and machine learning to demote fraudulent or misleading publications, as well as the pages that broadcast them in news feeds.
However, Facebook showed how concerned he was about the elections after the bad news debacle in 2016, which really disappointed us. Reuters wrote that the decision to ban the lie about voting restrictions was passed under Congressional pressure:
The ban on misinformation about voting methods, to be announced Monday, comes six weeks after Senator Ron Wyden asked Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg how Facebook will counter messages to remove votes. for example by indicating to certain users that they could vote. text, a hoax that has been used to reduce participation in the past.
Information on voting methods is becoming one of the few areas in which lies are banned on Facebook, a policy imposed by what the company calls moderators "community standards", although the application of its standards has been uneven. This will not stop the vast majority of misleading messages about candidates or other electoral issues.
As Reuters noted, Facebook has already banned voting when and where to vote. CNBC indicated that the amendments extended this prohibition to "messages on exaggerated identification requirements", although it does not appear that lies or misrepresentations regarding the conditions prevailing at polling locations subject to a procedure that is heavier than the standard fact-checking procedure.
The change does not extend either to widespread propaganda and misinformation about elections.
"We do not think we should remove from Facebook the elements shared by real people if they do not violate these community standards, even if they are false," Facebook product manager Tessa Lyons told Reuters.
According to Bloomberg, Facebook opens new direct lines of communication with the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of Election Electors of States, while allowing users to "directly report cases of voter suppression". they see a message in their news feeds. "
Reuters wrote that Facebook's cybersecurity policy officer, Nathaniel Gleicher, had also revealed that the company had planned to ban all pirated documents, which would have obvious consequences on information leaked by launchers. 39, alert or forwarded to reporters, while other sources have announced to have briefly raised the ban on all political announcements. . None of these measures has been taken.
One wonders if it will work. Facebook has long claimed that it was taking the problem seriously, but the measures it had put in place were far from enough to stop the spread of unwanted, falsified and fictitious content on the site. This problem is also not specific to Facebook: massive technology platforms in general, such as Twitter and Google, struggle in the same way to control the beast they unleashed, and it is certainly not helping that they prefer to limit their responsibility for what is happening. via their platforms in the first place. In any case, Facebook wants everyone to know that they are at least trying to do something before they start screaming again.
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