Facebook is launching a tool on Thursday thats meant to help register at least 4 million Americans to vote ahead of the 2020 election.
The companys new Voter Information Center is a hub on both Facebook and Instagram that will give you an easy way to check if youre registered to vote. If youre not, Facebook will prompt you to click a link where you can register in your state.
The Voter Information Center will include information about how to vote including how to vote by mail, if its an option where you live. Facebook is also using the initiative to ask users to sign up as poll workers, who are in short supply due to Covid-19. Facebooks efforts are in part a response to the pandemic, during which more people than ever are expected to vote using mail-in ballots, rather than voting in person. Lately, theres been a lot of confusion and anxiety about that process, perpetuated in part by President Trump and other politicians making false statements about the accuracy of mail-in voting on Facebook and other social media platforms.
Facebooks new voting center is an attempt to set the facts straight about voting, and the company said that its using politically neutral sources like the Bipartisan Policy Center to do so. But Facebook has stopped short of actually fact-checking or removing the misleading information that President Trump has shared on its platform about mail-in voting, something it has been sharply criticized for. Last month, Facebook started adding links to voter information underneath politicians posts about voting, and says it will start applying that label to all users posts about voting going forward. But these links dont correct misinformation when politicians post it.
Heres what the new Voting Information Center will look like:
In addition to the voting information hub, the company says its releasing a Voting Alerts feature to let state and local election authorities send notifications to users in their jurisdiction about updates about voting, including potential late-breaking changes to the voting process.
For months, Democratic politicians, civil rights advocates, and some of Facebooks own employees have been criticizing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for not taking action on President Donald Trumps misleading posts about voting-by-mail. Trump has falsely asserted on the platform that the state of California will send mail-in ballots to anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there (in fact, California only sends ballots to registered voters) and that this would lead to a Rigged Election. While Facebook left Trumps post up as-is, Facebooks competitor Twitter labeled an identical post on its platform as containing potentially misleading information.
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In a previous announcement in June about the Voter Information Center efforts, Zuckerberg framed the companys efforts to register people to vote as a better way of ensuring a healthy election than policing politicians speech.
Zuckerberg wrote at the time, Ultimately, I believe the best way to hold politicians accountable is through voting, and I believe we should trust voters to make judgments for themselves.
Todays launch of the Voter Information Center is Zuckerberg showing hes serious about his commitment to encourage people to vote, but it remains to be seen if that will be enough to counterbalance the politicians who use his platform to spread messages that encourage the very opposite to the 190 million Facebook users in the US.
Home>>Festivals>>But the company still won’t fact check President Trump’s misleading posts about voting by mail.
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