Under pressure to combat the disinformation that politicians — most notably the president of the United States — are spreading on its platforms, Facebook recently announced a new effort to combat lies geared in particular toward misleading Americans about voting.
Disinformation aimed at voting is a particularly pernicious form of it, especially right now. These days much of it is designed to cripple efforts to expand vote-by-mail, at a time when more and more Americans want to avail themselves of it so they can vote safely during a pandemic.
President Trump has been lying relentlessly about vote-by-mail for weeks, in an obvious effort to dissuade localities from scaling up for more mail voting, because he believes more people voting this way makes his reelection less likely.
Unfortunately, even though Facebook is vowing a vigorous effort to clean up information about voting, it is unlikely to do much to prevent Trump from spreading his lies about vote-by-mail in particular.