On Friday, tech giant Facebook said that it will start labeling newsworthy content that violates the social media company’s policies and will label all posts and ads about voting with links to authoritative information, including those from politicians.
Facebook Inc said on Friday it will start labeling newsworthy content that violates the social media company’s policies and will label all posts and ads about voting with links to authoritative information, including those from politicians.
A Facebook spokeswoman confirmed its new policy would have meant attaching a link on voting information to U.S. President Donald Trump’s post last month about mail-in ballots. Rival Twitter had affixed a fact-checking label to that post.
Lately, Facebook has faced criticism for several posts of U.S. President Donald Trump that were left unnoticed even though they had harsh rhetoric in them.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, issued a statement in which he said:
‘’There are no exceptions for politicians in any of the policies I’m announcing here today.’’
He added that Facebook will ban ads that claim people from groups based on race, religion, sexual orientation or immigration status are a threat to physical safety or health.
According to Reuters, the policy changes come during a growing ad boycott campaign, called “Stop Hate for Profit,’’ that was started by several U.S. civil rights groups after the death of George Floyd, to pressure the company to act on hate speech and misinformation.
Rashad Robinson, president of civil rights group Color of Change, said on Twitter:
“What we’ve seen in today’s address from Mark Zuckerberg is a failure to wrestle with the harms FB has caused on our democracy & civil rights. If this is the response he’s giving to major advertisers withdrawing millions of dollars from the company, we can’t trust his leadership.’’
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