Facebook relies on third-party fact checkers to curb the spread of fake news and viral misinformation.
But not all users are subject to the social network’s reviews.
Speaking at the Atlantic Festival in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Facebook’s Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications Nick Clegg revealed that politicians are “exempt” from inspection.
“We do not submit speech by politicians to our independent fact checkers, and we generally allow it on the platform even when it would otherwise break our normal content rules,” according to Clegg.
“We don’t believe,” he wrote in an accompanying blog post, “that it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny.”
The policy—”on the books for over a year now”—means Facebook does not send organic content or ads from politicians to partners for review.
If a lawmaker shares previously debunked material (links, photos, videos), however, that content is demoted, replaced with related information from fact checkers, and rejected from adverts.
This is in keeping with Facebook’s newsworthiness exemption, introduced in 2016, which allows posts that break community standards “if we believe the public interest in seeing it outweighs the risk of harm,” Clegg said.
Moving forward, the popular platform will treat speech from politicians as “newsworthy content that should, as a general rule, be seen and heard.”
There are two exceptions: when speech endangers people, and when Facebook takes money (in which case posted ads must comply with community standards and advertising policies).
Clegg’s speech also covered:
- Calls for the break-up of big tech: “Pulling apart globally successful American businesses won’t actually do anything to solve the big issues we are all grappling with—privacy, the use of data, [and] harmful content”
- Election integrity: “It is no secret that Facebook made mistakes in 2016”
- Deepfake videos: “We must and we will get better at identifying lightly manipulated content before it goes viral”
Twitter recently took its own stance on political speech, introducing a new notice meant to provide clarity about certain tweets that violate company rules but remain on the platform.
The feature—a sort of warning screen users must click through before seeing a tweet—applies only to verified government officials with more than 100,000 followers.
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