Facebook could create an election commission

Facebook he contacted some scholars and political experts to form one election commissionwhich will allow to evaluate issues related to American and worldwide voting. The goal is to move decisions from the management of the social network to an external and independent commission.

Facebook aims to create an election commission

According to reports from the New York Times, five people who are working on the project have anonymously reported the work behind the scenes on Facebook. After the many complaints about the decision to do not delete political advertisements containing fake news, the social network wants to leave the burden of making decisions regarding the votes to an independent body.

The first due date for this commission should be the elections for the American midterms of 2022, where part of the Congress is renewed. Elections already excited a year in advance, with many misleading advertisements starting to arrive on the platform (especially regarding the last presidential elections, still contested without evidence by some Republicans).

Two of the people interviewed by the Times report how Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to be seen as the only one making decisions I respect the topic of elections. But for the moment, Facebook does not comment on this commission, which is still in the preliminary training phase.

This decision closely resembles the creation of the Oversight Board in 2018, a group of journalists and experts in politics and law who were supposed to judge the posts to be removed from the platform. The most important decision this group made was the suspension of Donald Trump from the platform, after the terrorist assault on the Capitol on January 6. The commission had judged “inappropriate” the suspension without time limits, not envisaged by the regulation. Leading Facebook to choose to suspend Trump for at least two years.

This decision is bound to cause discussion. But some activists believe it is a step in the right direction. An admission that Facebook alone it cannot make decisions that affect elections around the worldor. Whether it will work remains to be seen.