As American election day inches closer with just a few days before the citizens cast their votes, the world’s leading social media network Facebook puts together specific measures as it anticipate disturbance relating to the elections.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the company plans to curb unrest on its platform by slowing the spread of viral content, tweaking the news feed to change what types of content users see and lowering the threshold for what the software flags as harmful.
"We've spent years building for safer, more secure elections. We've applied lessons from previous elections, hired experts and built new teams with experience across different areas to prepare for various scenarios.”
“We've created new products, partnerships and policies, such as pausing post-election ads to ensure that we are more prepared than ever for the unique challenges of an election during a global pandemic."
Mark Zukerberg took to Facebook in September to announce the news, saying this year’s election is not going to be business as usual.
“We all have a responsibility to protect our democracy. That means helping people register and vote, clearing up confusion about how this election will work, and taking steps to reduce the chances of violence and unrest”, he stated in a post.
“We're going to extend our work with election officials to remove misinformation about voting. We already committed to partnering with state election authorities to identify and remove false claims about polling conditions in the last 72 hours of the campaign, but given that this election will include large amounts of early voting, we're extending that period to begin now and continue through the election until we have a clear result”, he further stated.
IOL TECH