A number of U.S. social media and technology companies, including Facebook, have stepped up censorship and regulation of information content on their platforms to counter online misinformation about the 2020 U.S. election.
Facebook Chief Executive Zuckerberg said in a statement Thursday that Facebook will ban any new campaign ads in the week leading up to the November election on the grounds that it will not be able to – in such a short period of time – confirm whether the information depicted in the ads is true.
In addition, Facebook will remove any postings that claim that getting out to vote will expose you to the new coronavirus, and will link to authoritative information about the new coronavirus outbreak under posts that make such claims.
Facebook will also tag postings that question the legitimacy of the voting method and election results. If any candidate is declared the winner before the final results are tallied, Facebook will also tag them and link to the official results.
Zuckerberg wrote: “This year’s election comes at a special time. We all have a responsibility to defend our democracy.”
In the statement, Zuckerberg said foreign powers were once again trying to disrupt the election, and that some accounts and pages posting false information had been removed.
On Tuesday, Facebook and Twitter said they removed a Russian-backed group that was spreading disinformation, the Russian Internet Research Agency, which has been accused of interfering with the 2016 election. The group is accused of interfering in the 2016 presidential election.
Earlier, U.S. intelligence agencies had also said that China, Russia, and Iran had begun meddling in this year’s election.
According to Bill Evanina, director of the National Center for Counterintelligence and Security, the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment is that China wants Trump not to be elected, Russia is trying to discredit Democrat Biden, and Iran is trying to undermine America’s democratic institutions.
As President Trump’s stance on China has hardened, a pro-China political network has spent months using social media to post a series of online content to disrupt U.S. political opinion and try to undermine President Trump’s re-election campaign, according to a study published by social media monitoring firm Graphika.
A Twitter spokesperson told VOA on Thursday that foreign interference was among the emergencies that could arise during the election in the company’s internal simulation exercise.
Other rehearsed emergencies include: leaked information stolen by hackers, platform manipulation campaigns, organized voter suppression on the Internet, and the fallout after Election Day.
Over the past period of time, Twitter has also begun flagging and even deleting some of the misinformation on the platform. In addition, government agencies and government-run media accounts in various countries have also been flagged. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying, Zhao Lijian, and others have been tagged with the words “Chinese government accounts. China Global Television Network (CGTN) was marked as “Chinese government-affiliated media.
Last month, major technology companies including Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft issued a joint statement saying that they had begun regular meetings with U.S. government authorities to cooperate on preventing election interference.
The statement reads, “Over the past few years, we have worked closely to counteract the information operations taking place on our platforms. In preparation for the upcoming elections, we are regularly meeting and discussing current trends with U.S. government agencies responsible for protecting the integrity of elections.”
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