Team News Riveting
Even as the high pitched election campaign is picking up in America, social media platform Facebook is facing tough challenges.
While announcing to ban new political advertisements on its site in the week before Election Day, Facebook said it would strengthen measures against posts that try to dissuade people from voting. Post-election, Facebook said it would quash any candidates’ attempts at claiming false victories by redirecting users to accurate information on the results.
The social media network is bracing for a contentious presidential election as Donald Trump and Joseph Biden ratchet up their attacks on each other. Trump had questioned the legitimacy of mail-in voting and suggested that he might not accept the election results.
“This election is not going to be business as usual,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, wrote in a post. He said he was concerned about the challenges that people could face when voting in a pandemic and how the count might take days or weeks to finalize, potentially leading to more unrest.
As a result, he said, “we all have a responsibility to protect our democracy.”
Facebook has become a key battleground for the Trump and Biden campaigns. While Trump’s campaign had run ads on the social network featuring false corruption accusations about Biden, the latter’s campaign has criticized Facebook for allowing lies, while also spending millions of dollars to buy ads on the service to appeal to voters.
The social network is striving to prevent itself from being misused. It also wanted to keep either Republicans or Democrats from saying that it unduly influenced voters. In particular, Facebook wants to avoid a repeat of 2016, when Russians used the service to promote Trump.
