Social-Media
Facebook is getting ready for an awkward election day
Today , Facebook released the long-promised voting awareness center, planned as an unbiased guide to helping Americans cast their ballots in the upcoming election.
Despite the election more than two months out, the center's content is primarily focused on voter registration, but Facebook officials said that the focus will change as the polling day approached, shifting to the particulars of the voting process and, after the polling day itself, fair monitoring of results.
When we get closer to Election Day, voting by mail will be much more critical to voters who choose to stay away from busy polling stations, said Naomi Gleit, VP Brand Management and Social Impact at Facebook.
Early voting would also be an important choice for certain voters, depending on the laws of their own government.
Most ominously, Facebook is preparing for the voter information center to become a definitive source of election returns after the polls close, because slowing the counting of mail-in ballots could cause the final results to be postponed by several days.
It looks more and more that we will not have an election night score, said Facebook security chief Nathaniel Gleicher. We want people to understand the discussion, but we do want people to understand the truth
When the election passes, the Facebook Voting Information Center will be put at the top of the News Feeds user list, close to the COVID-19 information center launched in March. Facebook will also provide links to the center in election-related messages, both from elected leaders and from regular people. Nonetheless, the content will only be available to those who click on the page, so it is not known how effective the program would prevent the dissemination of disinformation across the network.
The initiative arrives in the middle of a the controversy about mail-in ballots, which many election boards have suggested as a means of mitigating the virus risk at conventional in-person polling places.
Despite the fact that many absentee ballots were cast by phone, President Trump was highly dismissive of the attempts, baselessly accusing phone-in ballots of being "a tool for winning an election."
More specifically, President Trump has vetoed support for the US Postal Service as a method of eliminating the successful collection of mail-in ballots. [Democrats] use the money to get the post office to operate so that it can collect out these millions and millions of votes, Fox Business said in an interview. There are only two things, so if they don't have those two items, it means you can't get automatic mail-in voting.
