Facebook to pause all political advertisingafter the election

Facebook, which through its collection of apps reaches the vast majority of the US population, has again launched a new slew of initiatives to mitigate the harm misinformation on its platforms can cause.Several of these measures are sound ideas, but unfortunately, two of its latest efforts once again amount to waiting until the horse has made it halfway around the world before you shut the barn door.

The company has promised for months that it will run real-time fact-checking on and after November 3 to prevent any candidate from declaring victory before a race is actually called, and it showed what that process will look like.

For the last year, Facebook has maintained an infamously hands-off stance when it comes to fact-checking political advertising. The platform has occasionally intervened, usually after media pressure, when those ads cross the line of one of its other policies.Other ads, howeverincluding deceptively manipulated photos and videos of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Bidenhave been left alone.

It seems clear that social media platforms, acting alone, cannot sufficiently address the threat of coordinated disinformation.

But Facebook also wants help from the law in the form of actual consequences for conducting certain kinds of influence operations.

Original article