Facebook is planning to play an active role in November’s U.S. presidential election, the platform announced on Wednesday.
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According to the announcement shared on the platform, the social network will promote participation in the election, with all U.S. users being shown official information on voting rules and procedure.
The new information area, dubbed The Voting Information Centre, has the expressed goal of helping 4 million people register to vote in November’s poll.
Facebook will also give users the option to delete all election advertising and political advertisements from their news feeds.
Another new feature will clearly mark political adverts as such and provide a link with information about their funders that will remain on the post even if shared by users.
Facebook has made it clear that it will not fact-check political content, however.
The social network came under heavy fire in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election for being slow to recognise that political propaganda generated in Russia was circulating on its platform.
Founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg now claims robust measures have been put in place to prevent such interference.
“In 2016, we were slow to identify foreign interference on our platform,’’ Zuckerberg wrote in an accompanying editorial in USA Today on Wednesday.
“Since then, we’ve built some of the most advanced systems in the world to protect against election interference,’’ he claimed.
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