Staff Reports
As you are aware, we are currently in the midst of the election season for the midterms. The United States is in the midst of holding its primaries one after the other, and political campaigns are pulling out all the stops in a "all hands on deck" type of style. In a similar vein, election offices and media companies are getting ready for the anticipated surge of voters at the polls.
Facebook, which is a significant source of both information and news, is also getting ready.
As the day of the election, November 2, gets near, the social media behemoth unveiled its strategy on Tuesday to counteract voter misinformation and intervention.
According to the firm, they spent $5 billion on security measures in the previous year. Since then, they have employed hundreds of additional staff whose sole responsibility is to make the platform safer and more secure. The primary objective for 2022 is to make it illegal for any advertisement to call into question the veracity of an election or to encourage individuals not to cast their ballot.
According to Meta, the parent company of Facebook, as well as its President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg, the procedure and the majority of the measures utilized will be relatively comparable to the one used by the firm in 2020, albeit with some new additions of course. Clegg mentioned that the organization is always looking for new and innovative security elements and is investing in the security of online elections. It's not only something that comes up during election season for them.
According to what he stated, with each major election around the world – including national elections this year in France and the Philippines – we use the lessons we learn in order to assist keep ahead of new dangers.
To the letter, as it should be.
Having said that, a task of this nature is not a simple one. Additionally, there are those on both sides who are unhappy with the way Facebook has handled certain situations in the past. The platform has been accused of not doing enough by some, while others have said that it is restricting our freedom to free speech as guaranteed by the first amendment.
You are aware that the latter viewpoint has been held by Donald Trump for some time. He asserts that due to such censorship, the American people were not permitted to know everything there is to know about Hunter Biden's transgressions, his father's involvement in them, or just how geriatric Biden is.
Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter made it a point to muzzle voices that they deemed to be too harmful for their communities. It so happens that they were all from the right side of the room.
In the two years that have passed since Facebook's role in Trump's loss of a second term in office, the question that will be asked is whether or not the social media platform has become less prejudiced.
According to Clegg, their security has improved, and it has already been utilized to prevent dozens of organisations, including 270 white nationalist ones, from interfering with elections. One of the groups that was stopped was an attempt to hack the election system. According to him, the platform and its systems discovered approximately 97% of the millions of pieces of information that were removed before anyone reported it.
According to him, as we did in 2020, we have a dedicated team in place to counteract election and voter interference while also assisting people get credible information about when and how to vote. This statement was made by him.
Naturally, he asserts that his company's fact-checkers as well as the staff responsible for voting and elections are "independent" and objective, and that the company would not prohibit information or users due to differences in viewpoint. However, if they are anything like the folks who worked in those sections during the 2020 election, we may expect the same kind of one party only permitted that prevailed in the media at the time.
But there's always a chance, right?
Some other thing that will remain the same in both 2018 and 2020 is that the platform will continue to prohibit any new campaign advertisements during the final week before the election. This is due to the fact that there is not enough time before the election to refute any new claims that may be made by political ads.
During the most recent election season, they made use of "labels that connect people with credible information." They might do the same thing this time around. However, Clegg has stated that they will only be used when absolutely necessary because there have been some complaints about them.
The month of November is getting closer, but only time will tell how impartial the media behemoth will be and, as a result, how beneficial or detrimental it may be to the political processes, candidates, and election workers in the United States.
The preceding is a summary of an article that originally appeared on American Retirement Insider.
