SAN FRANCISCO – Facebook spent years preparing for any manipulation on its site ahead of the November presidential election. Now the social network is ready in case President Trump intervenes when the vote is over.
Employees at the Silicon Valley company lay out plans for events and walk through post-election scenarios that attempt Mr. Trump’s efforts as his campaign to use the platform to delegitimize the results, said people with knowledge of Facebook’s plans .
Facebook is preparing steps to take if Mr. Trump incorrectly claims on the site that he won another term of four years, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Facebook is also working through how it can act as Mr. Trump invalidates the results by declaring that the Postal Service has lost mail-in-votes or that other groups are interfering with the vote, the people said.
Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, and some of his lieutenants have begun holding daily meetings on minimizing how the platform can be used to fight the election, people said. They have discussed a ‘kill switch’ to shut down political ads after election day, because the ads, which Facebook did not blame for truth, could be used to spread false information, the people said.
The preparations underscore how growing concerns about the integrity of the November election have reached social media companies, whose sites could be used to reinforce lies, conspiracy theories and inflammatory messages. YouTube and Twitter have also discussed plans for action if the post-election period is complicated, according to disinformation and political researchers who have advised the companies.
The tech companies have spent the past few years preventing a recurrence of the 2016 election, when Russian operatives used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to divide U.S. voters with disseminating messages. While the companies have since emphasized their foreign mediation, they expect an increase in domestic interference, such as from the right-wing conspiracy group QAnon and Mr. Trump himself.
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump, who uses social media as a megaphone, has scratched his remarks about the election. He questioned the legitimacy of mail-in voting, suggesting that people’s mail-in votes would not be counted and avoiding answering whether he would resign if he lost.
Alex Stamos, director of Stanford University’s Internet Observatory and a former Facebook executive, said Facebook, Twitter and YouTube faced a unique situation where they “potentially have to treat the president as a bad actor” who is democratic. process can undermine.
“We have no experience with that in the United States,” he added. Stamos.
Facebook can be in a very difficult position, because Mr Zuckerberg has said that the social network stands for acquittal. Unlike Twitter, the tweets from Mr. Trump has marked for glorifying factual inaccuracy and violence, Facebook has said that posts of politicians are newsworthy and that the public has the right to see them. Any action taken on messages from Mr. Trump as his post-vote campaign could open Facebook up to accusations of censorship and anti-conservative bias.
In an interview with The New York Times this month, Mr Zuckerberg said of the election that people “need to be prepared for the fact that there is a high chance that it will take days or weeks to count this – and there is nothing wrong or illegal. “
A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on their mailing strategy. “We continue to plan for a range of scenarios to ensure we are ready for the upcoming elections,” he said.
Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said: “President Trump will continue to work to ensure the security and integrity of our election.”
Google, which owns YouTube, confirmed that it was in talks about mailing strategy, but declined to comment. Jessica Herrera-Flanigan, vice president of Twitter for public policy, said the company was evolving its policy to “better identify, understand and reduce threats to public discourse, both before and after an election.”
Facebook had initially focused on the run-up to the election – the period when, in 2016, most of the Russian mediation took place on its site. The company has mapped nearly 80 scenarios, many of which saw what might have gone wrong on their platform before Americans voted, people with knowledge of the talks said.
Facebook is investigating what it would do, for example, if hackers backed by a nation-state leaked documents online, or if a nation-state at the last minute launched a widespread disinformation campaign to discourage Americans from going to the polls, one employee said.
To support the effort, Facebook has invited those in government, think tanks and academia to participate and conduct exercises around the hypothetical election situations.
An idea that came up during one exercise – that Facebook labels state media messages so users know they are reading content through government sponsors – was launched in June, said Graham Brookie, director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council, which attended the session.
“We can see that their policy decisions are influenced by these exercises,” he said.
But Facebook was less decisive about other issues. If a post suggested that mail-in voting was broken, or encouraged people to submit multiple copies of their mail-in votes, the company would not delete the messages if they were framed as a suggestion or a question, one person t advised the company said. Under the rules of Facebook, it only takes down voice-related messages that are allegations containing apparently false and misleading information.
In recent months, Facebook has turned more to post-selection planning. That shift accelerated this month when Mr. Trump said more about the issue, two Facebook employees said.
On August 3, Mr. Trump asked the question of whether the Democrat should be re-elected in New York’s 12th Congressional District due to long delays in counting post-in ballot papers.
“I do not know what happens to the votes and the lost votes and the fraudulent votes,” he said.
The next day, Mr. Trump broadened his attack, falsely stating that mail-in polls nationwide were leading to more voter fraud nationwide. “Emails are very dangerous for this country because of cheaters,” he said. ‘They’re going to collect them. They are fraudulent in many cases. ”
Mr Trump’s remarks alarmed Facebook staff working to protect their site in the US election. On the group’s internal chat channels, many wondered if Mr. Trump would launch even more attacks against votes for mail-in, one employee who saw the messages said. Some questioned whether the president violated Facebook’s rules to decipher voters.
Those questions were eventually sent to Mr. Zuckerberg, as well as top executives including Joel Kaplan, the global head of public policy, the employee said.
At a staff meeting later that week, Mr Zuckerberg told staff that if political figures or commentators tried to declare victory in an early election, Facebook would consider adding a label to its posts explaining that the results were not definitive. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. Zuckerberg said the company “was in unusual territory with the president saying some of the things he says I find quite troublesome.” The meeting was previously reported by BuzzFeed News.
Since then, executives have been discussing the ‘kill switch’ for political advertising, according to two staff members, who would suspend political ads after November 3 if the election results were not immediately clear or if Mr. Trump disputed the results.
The talks remain fluid, and it is unclear if Facebook will follow up with the plan, said three people close to the talks.
In an interview with reporters this month, Facebook executives said they removed more than 110,000 pieces of content between March and July that violated the company’s election policies. They also said that there was a lot about the elections that they did not know.
“In this rapidly changing environment, we are always kind of ‘red teaming’ and are we working with partners to understand what the next risks are?” said Guy Rosen, vice president of integrity at Facebook. “What are the different kinds of things that can go wrong?”
Mike Isaac reported from San Francisco, and Sheera Frenkel from Oakland, Calif.
