Facebook has announced steps to combat misinformation and voter suppression ahead of the November 2020 U.S. presidential election, on the same day it disclosed the removal of a network of Russian accounts targeting U.S. voters on Instagram.
Facebook said on Monday it would increase transparency through measures such as showing more information about the confirmed owner of a Facebook page and more prominently labeling content that independent fact-checkers have marked as false.
Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended the policy, saying social media had introduced transformative avenues for speech that should not be shut down.
Katie Harbath, Facebook’s head of global elections policy, said in response that if the now inactive ad ran again, it would be sent to Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers.The company will start labeling state-controlled media on its page and in the site’s ad library. In a blog post, Facebook said it planned to expand this labeling to specific posts on both Facebook and Instagram early next year.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the video-streaming service of Alphabet’s Google, all recently came under scrutiny after showing ads from Chinese state-controlled media that criticized Hong Kong protesters.