On Tuesday, Facebook finally tagged President Trump’s misleading posts about the vote, but it’s not fact-checking what people have been asking for.
Instead, the social media platform is enforcing a new policy to add a link to official voting information every time a Facebook user, be it a common user or a prominent politician, posts anything about voting in the U.S. Democratic party leaders, including a spokesperson for the Biden campaign, have harshly criticized the measure, arguing that it is too little too late.
This is because Facebook is adding the tag to voting posts, regardless of whether they share accurate or inaccurate information. He added a similar link to the voting information to some of the recent messages from Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, including one that said, “We have to vote for Donald Trump in November.”
Trump’s tagged Facebook post on Tuesday makes an unsubstantiated claim that voting by mail will lead to a “corrupt” and “manipulated” election. The label under Trump’s post makes no comment on the content, and instead links to instructions on how voters can register to vote by mail.
Facebook’s new voting posting policy is part of its broader effort, first announced in June, to inform American voters of the upcoming presidential election. The new policies emerged amid widespread criticism that Facebook is not doing enough to stop President Trump’s spread of misinformation about voters, particularly after Twitter first tagged a previous Trump tweet about voting by mail as containing “potentially misleading” information in May.
Biden campaign spokesman Bill Russo called Facebook’s policy “an absolute and absolute failure” in a tweet Tuesday morning, in one of two tweets that criticized the implementation of the new tagging policy for Facebook.
Russo did not respond to Recode’s request for further comment on the matter; Another Biden campaign spokesman, Mike Gwin, rejected Recode’s request for comment.
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone declined to comment to Recode on Democratic party leaders’ concerns about tagging, but noted that the recent tagging was part of Facebook’s voter information plans announced last month.
Several other Democratic party leaders also weighed in on Twitter, arguing that it was unfair for Facebook to tag Biden the same way as Trump. They said the Biden post simply shared his opinion on who to vote for, while the Trump post denied the legitimacy of the U.S. electoral process.
A Democratic agent who spoke to Recode on condition of anonymity called Facebook’s tagging of Trump posts “ridiculously inappropriate.”
“They [Facebook] Basically they’re just putting a link in the post for Trump and they’re not saying in any way that the content of the information could be incorrect or that the information is not widely trusted, ”said the Democratize agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press. “You are letting the President of the United States go to your platform and say something that is not correct about voting by mail.”
In response to Facebook’s tagging of Trump posts, a Trump campaign spokeswoman Samantha Zager shared the following statement with Recode:
“The President was absolutely right. Universal postal voting is ripe for fraud and would lead to a corrupt election. The same tag has been applied to posts on the Joe Biden page. “
Trump’s claims that voting by mail in the US will lead to fraud are unfounded and widely debated by experts in political science and electoral integrity.
In addition to tagging, Facebook has been lobbying to register 4 million of its US users to vote, something Zuckerberg has previously framed as a better way for his company to support democracy than watching what politicians can say on the platform.
In recent days, Zuckerberg has also publicly denied being too sympathetic to Trump and unwilling to moderate the president’s Facebook posts. The tech CEO has also criticized Trump more publicly than in the past, speaking out against his immigration policies and his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
But Facebook’s refusal to take a position of any kind regarding the accuracy of Trump’s posts, and his continued insistence that it is a neutral platform, suggests that he hasn’t learned much since 2016. (Back then, Zuckerberg said shortly after the election it was “insane” to suggest that Facebook has influenced its outcome, a statement for which he later apologized.) What has changed since the last US presidential elections are the expectations that the public and politicians have for the platform, and for some, their new policies are not cut it.
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