Meta is going back to the tactics it used during the 2020 presidential elections in its bid to fight misinformation and deal with political ads, according to a report from Bloomberg.
The tech giant will be going back to its policy of removing posts with misinformation pertaining to inaccurate times, dates, locations as well as methods of voting, according to the Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg. The company will also remove false claims about who can vote, whether votes will be counted as well as posts that call for violence during voting.
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This will be the first time that Clegg will be overseeing an American election, a responsibility that was previously the job of outgoing Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, who is set to leave Meta in September.
Much like it did during the 2020 elections, the company will prohibit political parties and candidates from uploading any “political, electoral and social issue ads” in the week leading up to Election Day on November 8. In addition to banning ads, the company has partnered with 10 fact-checking agencies in the United States to address misinformation, half of which will cover Spanish content.
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Meta’s stance on political advertising has been controversial in the past, given that it didn’t used to fact-check ads. Things came to a head during the 2016 elections when the company unwittingly sold ad space to Russian trolls trying to sow chaos amongst American voters. Similarly, Meta came under fire in the aftermath the Jan 6 attack on Capitol Hill. Many of the people falsely claiming that the elections had been illegitimate had gathered and organised on Facebook.
In 2020 the company had told US lawmakers that it rejected 3.3 million ad submissions from political parties and had taken down or blocked 265,000 posts which contained misinformation. However, Republicans have criticised Meta for being too aggressive in its takedowns while Democrats says that the company has done too little to combat mininformation.