Hours before Trump’s post, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced new policies intended to protect the upcoming US election from disruption. Zuckerberg said the company had expanded its voter suppression policy to forbid content containing explicit and “implicit misrepresentations about voting.”
Some Facebook employees felt Trump’s post contained, at the very least, implicit misrepresentations about the voting process. Roughly an hour after Trump’s post appeared, an employee flagged it on the company’s internal discussion forum, Workplace.
“Seems like this already violates our extended policies on voter suppression by misrepresenting how or when to vote. Intentionally voting twice is a felony, right?” they wrote in a Workplace group focused on policy and communications issues.
A person on Facebook’s policy team responded to say Trump’s post was being reviewed by the company’s “Voter Interference subject matter expert[s].”
Multiple employees expressed confusion that the post hadn’t already been deemed violative and removed.
“This is voting misinformation,” said an employee. “Your polling place will not be able to track if your vote had been received.”…
Rather than remove Trump’s post, Facebook eventually decided to add a generic label with information about voting. It later changed that to a label emphasizing the security of mail-in voting. “Voting by mail has a long history of trustworthiness in the US and the same is predicted this year. (Source: Bipartisan Policy Center),” the second label reads.
Separately, Facebook said it had removed posts containing video footage of a Trump speech on Wednesday where he suggested people vote twice.