After years of revising and updating its election strategy, Meta Platforms Inc. is sticking with the same tactics it used during the 2020 general election.
To focus on scrubbing misinformation about voting and limiting new political ads in the week before Election Day is part of the plan.
"You will see that we both maintain the policies and practices where we think it makes sense but also improve upon them." All of this is to build on what we have already done. Consistency, be clear, fill the gaps where we can find them.
Similar to the general election two years ago, the company, which owns Facebook andInstagram, will remove posts that are misleading or call for violence based on the voting or election outcome. The ads that question the legitimacy of an election will be taken off the air.
Five Spanish-language organizations are working with Meta to review posts to make sure they are not misleading. Users will be asked to check out a section of the site with general voting information, which was created by employees.
Political advertising is one part of Meta's approach. In the week before the election, no new ads on political or social issues can run, just like in 2020, though the company reviewed and revised the policy. During the week before the vote, marketers will not be able to change the ad design.
It was important to avoid carrying inflammatory ads at the last minute.
Meta doesn't fact check political ads. The company has debated internally on how to handle political ads for years and was criticized after the 2016 US election for selling ads to Russians. The January 6, 2021 insurrection was organized in part on Facebook and was fueled by false claims of an illegitimate election.
There was mixed reaction to the idea of blocking political ads completely. The US electoral system gives paid speech, according to the leader of the Liberal Democrats.
Meta thinks it has an obligation to carry that kind of material. Meta makes political advertisers register with the company and shows their promotions in a public archive, instead of blocking ads.
In 2020, the company said it blocked or removed 265,000 posts and rejected 3.3 million ad submissions that violated its policies. The response was divided among politicians. The Republicans accused the social media giant of being too aggressive. Democrats pointed to posts from Donald Trump that his opponents said contained misinformation.
Clegg asserts that the company can still make changes as needed, even though the company is mostly using an old approach. He is the first American to have full discretion over related policy decisions.
There will be things we can't predict and things that will go better. As long as I am doing this job, I will be self-critical as to whether or not we are doing the right thing.
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