Facebook Provides Update on Efforts to Prevent Interference in German Elections (Sep 27, 2017)
Facebook has provided an update on its efforts to prevent interference in the recent federal elections in Germany, and says that in the month before the election it removed tens of thousands of fake accounts in Germany (it had previously said something similar about the recent French elections). But Facebook’s post also tries to make clear a distinction which has often been lost in the context of Facebook’s influence on elections: that its algorithms and the way it treats news and other posts have not swayed elections, while its official and transparent tools for politicians and political parties absolutely have had multiple effects. That’s a theme in the post, in which Facebook talks about politicians using the platform to reach voters and a variety of tools the company set up to help voters understand the issues and so on, much as it has promoted voting and information about candidates and their policy positions in the US. I frequently see Twitter posts which suggest that Facebook claims not to influence elections at all, but that’s misleading – its point is that it has transparent and official tools for politicians and parties to legitimately influence voters, while it’s doing its best to crack down on illegitimate uses of its platforms for those purposes. However, this post reiterates a point from Mark Zuckerberg’s brief speech last week on the topic – that Facebook will never be perfect at this, and its goal is to make it harder to mislead through the platform.
Update/Related: Mark Zuckerberg later today posted about President Trump’s critical tweet this morning with more of the same message and something of an apology for his initial reaction to criticisms of Facebook’s role in the election.
via Facebook
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