Facebook announced that it will ban ads on its platform that ask people in the United States not to vote, which they said occurred in the 2016 presidential election as part of a “tactic” to influence elections.
In the second installment of its Civil Rights Audit, the Menlo Park company indicated that it is developing this new company policy and specified that the ban will be limited to “posts”, so, in principle, it would not affect the comments of the users.
“We are learning from past actions in which our platform has been used improperly to suppress the vote, and we are working on a policy that prohibits ads aimed at people not voting,” said the most used social network in the world in its report. .
The company already removes content that it believes have been created to confuse citizens or spread false information about voting dates or places, and with this prohibition it seeks to avoid campaigns that encourage abstention among certain groups.
The company’s most immediate goal is the 2020 presidential election in the US, in which President Donald Trump will run for re-election and which is expected to be especially tense.
Facebook has been at the center of the debate for months on what role it should play as a regulator of the content that is shared on its platform and especially on how it should fight against the spread of false news, which in recent years have influenced life political and social of several countries.
In addition, the company is experiencing turbulent times as it has been splashed by a multitude of scandals related to its management of the privacy of user data, which have considerably tarnished its public image and could lead to a multimillion-dollar sanction.
The biggest controversy that had to face Facebook jumped in March last year, when it was revealed that the British consultancy Cambridge Analytica used an application to collect millions of Internet users of the platform without their consent and for political purposes.
The company used data from the platform to develop psychological profiles of voters, which allegedly sold to the campaign of the current president, Donald Trump, during the 2016 elections, among others.
