Mark Zuckerberg Announces Facebook To Add Warning Labels To Political Posts Violating Policies, Follows Twitter’s Measures
Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook will add warning labels and prompts to political posts that violate its policies, the platform’s CEO announced Friday afternoon.
The move, part of a review of the platform’s policies before the 2020 election, echoes actions Twitter has taken against misinformation in political speech.
The platform has flagged three tweets of President Donald Trump: keeping his posts up but including a warning. On May 26, Twitter applied labels on two Trump tweets about mail-in voting, which promoted baseless and false claims about the risk of fraud. Three days later, the platform hid a Trump tweet because it “glorified violence.” Most recently, a tweet about Washington D.C. protesters violated rules of “abusive behavior.”
Trump’s most recent tweet that was flagged by the platform.
In Zuckerberg’s new initiatives, he plans to provide more authoritative voting information, add more steps to fight voter suppression, create higher standards for hateful ads, and add more labels on newsworthy content, he wrote. Zuckerberg said that his reasoning for adding labels to newsworthy information is ” an important part of how we discuss what’s acceptable in our society.” He wrote:
We will soon start labeling some of the content we leave up because it is deemed newsworthy, so people can know when this is the case. We’ll allow people to share this content to condemn it, just like we do with other problematic content, because this is an important part of how we discuss what’s acceptable in our society — but we’ll add a prompt to tell people that the content they’re sharing may violate our policies.
To clarify one point: there is no newsworthiness exemption to content that incites violence or suppresses voting. Even if a politician or government official says it, if we determine that content may lead to violence or deprive people of their right to vote, we will take that content down. Similarly, there are no exceptions for politicians in any of the policies I’m announcing here today.
Zuckerberg’s plan comes in the midst of the “Stop Hate For Profit” campaign, which asks companies to end paid advertising on Facebook because “profits will never be worth promoting hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and violence,” its website wrote.
On Friday, Unilever announced it would end advertising on Facebook and Twitter citing their “polarized atmosphere[s].” Other companies, like Ben & Jerry’s and North Face, have also stopped advertising on Facebook in the last two weeks.
