These labels will link to a new voter information
hub similar to one about COVID-19 that
Facebook says has been seen by billions of users
around the world. The labels will read, “Visit the
Voting Information Center for election resources
and official updates.”
Despite such efforts, Facebook continues to face
widespread criticism around how it handles
misinformation around elections and other
matters. The company has generally refused to
fact-check ads by politicians, for instance, and a
two-year audit of its civil rights practices faulted
the company for leaving U.S. elections “exposed
to interference by the President and others who
seek to use misinformation to sow confusion
and suppress voting.”
The effectiveness of such labels will depend on
how well Facebook’s artificial intelligence system
identifies the posts that really need them, said
Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology’s Center for Civic Media.
If every post containing the word “vote” or
“voting” gets an informational link, he said,
“people will start ignoring those links.”
Facebook expects the voter hub to reach at
least 160 million people in the U.S., said Emily
Dalton Smith, who serves as head of social
impact at the company. The primary focus is
registering people to vote, she said, but the
information people see will evolve throughout
the election season.
“This is a unique election and a unique election
season,” she said. “Certainly we have never gone
through an election during a global pandemic.”
Other tech companies, Twitter and Google,
which owns YouTube, have undertaken similar