Arguably, Facebook has a power and ability to stop election misinformation, but seeing how Facebook is treading between the line of willing and not willing to share about that particular matter says a lot about their true capability to stop and prevent the election misinformation.
Guy Rosen, the VP of Integrity of Facebook, said that since March the company has already been putting “warning labels” on a lot of content, a lot here means 180 million pieces of content which means that a third-party fact checker already looked into the content and then exposed them. He said that on Thursday, on the on call with the press.
As a result, Facebook put a gray box over that 180 million of content when people proceed to share it through their Facebook account, that grey box is also put with a “false” warning label. Apart from that, Facebook also provides a link to the debunk, so people can learn about the truth and stop believing in these kinds of false content. Unluckily, 180 million is a big number and those kinds of labels and debunk doesn’t really cover the entire story.
Facebook takes an action to all posts in regard to the election where they put barely noticeable labels at the bottom of the posts along with a link to Facebook’s voting information center. The voting information center contains such “authoritative information” like some articles from trusted sources, updates from secretaries of state, and many more. Needless to say, Facebook gives warning labels to posts that claim premature victory, despite the truth that the votes are still being counted and the election hasn’t been certified yet. Therefore, whoever posts that kind of content will receive warning labels for Facebook.
Furthermore, Facebook did not really mention how extensive the need for those kinds of labels was. Facebook also did not answer numerous questions from reporters who wanted to know how efficient the labels were at reducing the sharing and liking of those kinds of ‘false’ posts. Actually, many people start to question why Facebook isn’t willing to share that kind of information openly to the public, which is really understandable.
The latest issue that Facebook needs to address is that the newest article from Buzzfeed News in which Facebook employees already knew that the act of putting those “warning labels” are futile at stopping Trump’s gibberish.
To counteract the BuzzFeed argument, Facebook data scientists bring the proof that shows the act of putting a warning label to those posts can reduce their re-share by 8 percent. Well, on the downside Trump already has abundant of share on many of that ‘false’ post, as a result the reduce is not going to change anything. To put it simply, Trump is outdone the warning label that Facebook put on those ‘false’ posts.
Furthermore, when Facebook is questioned about the effectiveness of election labels, the VP of Facebook’s Integrity said that the aim of the labels was to give more accurate and real information as well as content. He also didn’t want to give further explanation on specific numbers. Further, he explained to the audiences that data points share with the press are profoundly inspected. He also said that they should ignore the other numbers or amount that they might have seen. (Aren’t you all curious what he is really talking about? Really wonder what it could be)
The company also stated that they erased 265.000 pieces of content from both Facebook and Instagram in the United States because those posts have been violating the company’s interference policies. It can be concluded that those erased posts are about the misinformation on how to vote, or any other posts that aim to discourage people from voting. Furthermore, there has been 3.3 million submissions of ads that are being rejected because they came from unauthorized parties which are trying to manage ads on social and political issues.
In the meantime, Trump and his supporters have more time to continue their unproven theory about “rigged election”. They have so much more time until the election is certified. Well, much of that issue is going on Facebook. As a result many Facebook’s users keep on creating “Stop the Steal” groups. Furthermore, most of the top politics posts on Facebook over the past few weeks are dominated by Trump, and without a doubt many of his posts are aimed to spread misinformation and also to sabotage electoral integrity.
Well, at the very least most of his posts come with a “warning label” at the bottom.
