Facebook Reiterates Plan to Suppress Victory Declarations on Election Day

The big day will officially be here on Tuesday, as Americans head to the polls to hopefully put this election to rest.

The timetable is malleable, however.  Ohio law allows for ballots postmarked before election day to be counted for up to ten days after Tuesday.  In Pennsylvania, poll workers will have three days, and a bevy of other states operate under varying degrees of this sort of setup.

Of course, political operatives are going to look to exploit the confusion create by these situations, and the candidates themselves may find a way to use this to their advantage – possibly by declaring victory on social media before the states come to a conclusion.

Facebook is again stating that they will not stand for this. 

ZDNet reports that during a conference call with analysts, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that the social media giant plans to post notices at the top of users’ news feeds on November 3 discrediting claims by either U.S. presidential candidate that they have won the election if the site deems the announcement premature.

Zuckerberg stated: “If any candidate or campaign tries to declare victory before the final results are called, we will put a notification to the top of People’s Facebook and Instagram feed letting them know the results aren’t final yet and we’ll put an informational label on the candidate’s post.”

The Facebook CEO then gave a worrisome take on the potential for trouble.

Zuckerberg added that Facebook was taking the initiative as “There is a risk of civil unrest across the country, and given this, companies like ours need to go well beyond what we’ve done before.”

Facebook has been the subject of near-constant criticism in political circles, with some believing that the social media company is overstepping their authority in  regard to the First Amendment, and others saying that they aren’t doing enough to combat misleading information being shared on their platform.