Facebook to label posts about voting from political candidates
The social network aims to connect people with accurate information about the election.
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The label points to a government website on voting.
Facebook on Thursday began adding labels to posts about voting from federal officials and candidates, including presidential candidates, in the US. The label is meant to direct people to credible information about elections, and will appear on posts regardless of whether they contain misinformation.
For now, the labels will point to usa.gov/voting, an official government website with voting information. Posts specifically about voting by mail will point to usa.gov/absentee-voting. The company plans to direct people to its new voter information center when that launches later this summer.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in June announced plans to add labels to posts about voting, along with other efforts meant to crack down on voter suppression. The company plans to eventually expand these labels to posts about voting from everyone, not just federal officials and candidates.
Facebook has been accused of not doing enough to combat misinformation, including allowing politicians to lie in ads, which are exempt from fact-checking on the platform. Russian trolls used the social network during the 2016 US presidential election to widely spread disinformation.
On Thursday, a report published by ProPublica and nonprofit First Draft found that nearly half of all "top-performing posts" on Facebook that mentioned voting by mail were "false or misleading."