Meta, the corporate parent of Facebook, announced political discourse policies for November’s midterm will be stricter than 2020 election policies were.
The California-based social media platform claimed it spent more than $5 billion last year on safety and security measures designed to protect its users. “We’re focused on preventing voter interference, connecting people with reliable information and providing industry-leading transparency for ads about social issues, elections and politics,” Meta said in a staement.
The Daily Wire further reported:
In a blog post Tuesday, Meta announced that it would implement a series of policies to be used in the 2022 midterm elections, policies that are “consistent” with the same policies the platform used during the 2020 election. Those policies include “Preventing Election and Voter Interference,” “Connecting People With Reliable Information,” and “Transparency Around Elections and Advertising.”
“With the 2022 US midterms on the horizon, we are setting out how our approach applies in this election cycle, which is largely consistent with the policies and safeguards we had in place during the 2020 US Presidential election,” Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg wrote in the announcement.
“Our approach to the 2022 US midterms applies learnings from the 2020 election cycle and exceeds the measures we implemented during the last midterm election in 2018. This includes advanced security operations to fight foreign interference and domestic influence campaigns, our network of independent fact-checking partners, our industry-leading transparency measures around political advertising and pages, as well as new measures to help keep poll workers safe,” the announcement added.
Under the heading “Preventing Election and Voter Interference,” Meta touted its existing policies around removing hate speech, noting that it had already banned 270 white supremacist organizations and removed more than 2.5 million posts for hate speech in just the first quarter of 2022. The company then touted its relationships with state and local election officials, federal agencies and industry peers.
It went on to outline its content removal policies. “As was the case in the US in 2020, election-related content we will remove includes misinformation about the dates, locations, times, and methods of voting; misinformation about who can vote, whether a vote will be counted, and qualifications for voting; and calls for violence related to voting, voter registration, or the administration or outcome of an election. We will reject ads encouraging people not to vote or calling into question the legitimacy of the upcoming election.”
The company also announced that it would prohibit new political, electoral, and social issue ads during the final week before the election.
The New York Post must wonder if the publication’s account will be suspended in the weeks before the election based on its reporting. The tabloid’s account was suspended by Twitter and throttled by Facebook after it published articles about Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 general election.
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