Facebook election plan patches some holes, creates others

Some said the new rules may even make it harder for campaigns and election officials to counteract bogus claims in crunch time.

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that Facebook would stop accepting new political ads in the week before the U.S.

Banning new ads suggests Facebook executives realized they would not have time to identify and act on content that violates their rules in the last days before the vote, said Vanita Gupta, CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

The limits are an acknowledgement of the fact that they dont always move quickly enough to catch viral problems, said Gupta, who has advised Facebook on election preparations along with other civil society leaders.

Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist, said Facebook's failure to catch a militia group organizing on its platform around Kenosha, Wisconsin, last week - despite users flagging the material 455 times, as BuzzFeed reported here - cast doubt on its ability to moderate election-related content.

What makes us think that Facebooks going to be on top of this in front of one of the most hotly contested elections in recent memory?

Researchers had higher praise for the companys moves to elevate authoritative sources of information through its Voting Information Center and notifications that would appear at the top of users news feeds.

Gupta said Facebook was still working out how it would handle that period, even though Zuckerberg wrote that the changes announced Thursday were the final word.

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