Following through on its new policy announced in June, popular social media platform, Facebook, has on Tuesday placed a “voting info” label on a post made by U.S. President Donald Trump, that questioned the validity of the country’s mail-in voting system which he said would lead to a “corrupt election” process.
Facebook, through its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, had last month announced the platforms plan to label posts about the November polls from both individuals and politicians. “This isn’t a judgment of whether the posts themselves are accurate, but we want people to have access to authoritative information either way,” Zuckerberg explained. The labeling which began rolling out a few days ago, is a response to questions that were raised following previous incendiary posts put up by the Republican candidate and incumbent president leading up to the elections.
The label which does not dispute the original message posted, adds a link to official voting information from the U.S government’s official site. It was placed on Trump’s post which said, “Mail-In Voting, unless changed by the courts, will lead to the most CORRUPT ELECTION in our Nation’s History! #RIGGEDELECTION.” Cutting across parties, it has also been placed on presumptive Democratic candidate, Joe Bidden’s post, calling for the electorate to “vote Donald Trump out in November.”
Facebook is Performative, Not Effective
Facebook is not the first social media platform to institute this policy. In May, Twitter came under fire after it decided to flag a tweet by President Donald Trump. The difference between both approaches? While Facebook attaches a link to the official US voting information site, it fails to comment on the content at all. This could very much be misconstrued and viewed as backing information to the post labelled. Twitter, on the other hand, has been known to outrightly address the validity of the post on its site. It infamously labelled Trump’s previous tweet about mail-in voting as containing “potentially misleading” information.
Voting by mail is not new in the U.S as it was used during the 2016 general elections.
