Facebook says it will stop accepting political advertisements in the week before the US election, as its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg warned of “an increased risk of civil unrest across the country”.
Explaining the move, Mr Zuckerberg said, “This election is not going to be business as usual. We all have a responsibility to protect our democracy.”
He added that he “generally” believed “the best antidote to bad speech is more speech, but in the final days of an election there may not be enough time to contest new claims”.
In preparation for this, Facebook is going to “block new political and issue ads during the final week of the campaign”.
“So in the week before the election, we won’t accept new political or issue ads,” Mr Zuckerberg said, although political and issue ads that had already been running will be allowed to continue.
He continued that, Facebook was taking steps to encourage voter turn-out as well as tackle misinformation and prepare for candidates prematurely declaring the results.
In particular, he warned that the coronavirus pandemic, which was likely to result in an increased number of people voting by mail, could mean delays to vote counting.
“Many experts are predicting that we may not have a final result on election night,” he wrote.
“It’s important that we prepare for this possibility in advance and understand that there could be a period of intense claims and counter-claims as the final results are counted.
“With our nation so divided and election results potentially taking days or even weeks to be finalised, there could be an increased risk of civil unrest across the country.
“This could be a very heated period, so we’re preparing the following policies to help in the days and weeks after voting ends,” he said.
The social network has faced criticism for allowing political ads to be “micro-targeted” on its platform so that they are only seen by small communities rather than debated more widely in the days after they appear.
The Mozilla Foundation has claimed that this makes it easier for politicians and their supporters to parade fiction as fact and avoid being called out on it until it is too late, particularly as Facebook has previously said ads placed by candidates would not be fact-checked.
Facebook will however be putting a voting information centre panel on top of both Facebook and Instagram “almost every day until election” which will include video tutorials on postal voting and information of registration deadlines.
This panel will also “prepare people for the possibility that, it may take a while to get official results which will help people understand that, there is nothing illegitimate about not having a result on election night”.
Mr Zuckerberg also said that Facebook had also “strengthened” its enforcement policies against movements known to spread conspiracy theories, such as QAnon. He disclosed thousands of Facebook groups associated with these movements had already been removed.
The new steps could serve as a precedent for how the firm handles elections elsewhere in the future.
