https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/10/11/facebook-threatening-elections-again-229844

A new policy gives politicians free rein to spread misinformation and inflame racial tensions.

By VANITA GUPTA October 11, 2019

Vanita Gupta is president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. She served as head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division from 2014 to 2017.

After Facebook was implicated in the 2016 election wreckage, the company made strides to shore up the platform against future harms to our democracy. But now, Facebook is sabotaging its own efforts through a new policy: the explicit exemption of politicians’ speech from its community standards.

Since 2016, Facebook has maintained a “newsworthiness” exemption, meaning content that violates community standards—including hate speech and harassment—can still be posted when the public interest in viewing the content outweighs the risk of harm. With its new policy, Facebook will automatically presume speech from politicians to be newsworthy. Simply put: While major news organizations are strengthening fact-checking and accountability, Facebook is saying: If you are a politician who wishes to peddle in lies, distortion and not-so-subtle racial appeals, welcome to our platform. We will not fact-check. You are automatically newsworthy. You are automatically exempt from scrutiny.

This is extraordinarily reckless. In effect, Facebook is providing politicians free rein to spread misinformation and racially divisive content with no accountability.

As a former deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, I understand and support the importance of protecting freedom of expression, regardless of who the speaker is. Yet, a complete exemption for politicians—unless you can meet the high hurdle of showing their speech will incite violence—is simply not a reasonable approach. Free expression is a core principle of our democracy. But so are fair elections.

Just this week, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed that Russia used Facebook and other platforms to inflame racial tensions ahead of the 2016 election and to target black voters with disinformation, using fake accounts to discourage people from voting. Some politicians—candidates and elected officials—fed into these divisive narratives and amplified racial appeals for electoral gain. One would think that for the next U.S. presidential election, Facebook would take every precaution to prevent a repeat performance.

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