ProPublica and FirstDraft conducted a study of "Facebook posts using voting-related keywords — including the terms 'vote by mail,' 'mail-in ballots.' 'voter fraud' and 'stolen elections' — since early April [2020]." According to ProPublica, Donald Trump and conservatives have misprepresented that mail-in voting leads to voter fraud. That assertion has not been substantiated. For example, the Washington Post found states with all-mail elections — Colorado, Oregon and Washington— had only 372 potential irregularities of 14.6 million votes, meaning just or 0.0025%. According to a recent study by Prof. Nicolas Berlibski and others, unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud can negatively affect public confidence in elections. The false claims can significantly undermine the faith of voters, Republican or Democratic, in the electoral process, even when the misinformation is disproved by fact-checks.
In the study, ProPublica and FirstDraft found numerous posts on Facebook that contained misinformation about mail-in ballots. The study concluded: "Of the top 50 posts, ranked by total interactions, that mentioned voting by mail since April 1, 2020 [to July 2020] contained false or substantially misleading claims about voting, particularly about mail-in ballots." ProPublica identified the popular Facebook posts by using engagement data from CrowdTangle.
Facebook’s community standards state that no one shall post content that contains “[m]isrepresentation of the . . . methods for voting or voter registration or census participation.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said on his Facebook page in June 2020 that he stands against “anything that incites violence or suppresses voting,” and that the company is “running the largest voting information campaign in American history . . . to connect people with authoritative information about the elections . . . crack down on voter suppression, and fight hate speech.” Facebook reportedly removed more than 100,000 posts from Facebook and Instagram that violated the company's community standard against voter suppression from March to May 2020. As ProPublica reported, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla stated that "Facebook has removed more than 90% of false posts referred to it by VoteSure, a 2018 initiative by the state of California to educate voters and flag misinformation."
However, according to the joint project by ProPublica and First Draft, Facebook is still falling well short in the efforts to stop election misinformation. Facebook fails to take down posts from individual accounts and group pages that contain false claims about mail-in ballots and voter fraud, including some portraying "people of color as the face of voter fraud."
Facebook is reported to be considering banning political ads in the days before the election, but that hardly touches the core of the truly rampant fraud— misinformation of the public about mail ballots. False claims are far more widespread in posts than ads, according to the ProPublica and FirstDraft study.
--written by Yucheng “Quentin” Cui