US election: Facebook forced to change policies after Trump falsely claims victory

Donald Trump had prematurely declared victory in swing states despite votes still being tallied

(Getty Images)

Facebook has changed its policy on US politicians prematurely declaring victory during the presidential election, as fake claims about results continue to spread widely.

The social media giant had previously said that it would reject political adverts which declare victory before the results had been declared, and would flag posts from politicians of either party who claimed to have won the election nationally before all the votes were counted.

Now, Facebook has tightened its rules in order to stop people claiming victory in individual states before all the votes are counted.

“It's critical that people have accurate information about elections results. To that end we're expanding our premature declaration of victory labels to apply to people beyond the presidential candidates. We'll apply these at state-level and overall,” Adam Mosseri, the head of Facebook-owned Instagram tweeted.

However, Facebook is not applying labels on all premature declarations of victory, whether they are at national or state level.

“We're applying these on a case by case basis based on factors including potential for virality”, tweeted Facebook’s Liz Bourgeois.

The company had previously told the Wall Street Journal that its existing policy only ever applied to the overall result of the US election, not any individual states.

It said at the time that its plan was “to address premature calls for the final result of the presidential race” but that “for other posts we are applying labels directing people to them in the Voting Information Center where they can see what races have been called.”

President Donald Trump had previously declared victory nationally, despite votes still being counted in numerous swing states.

Members of Mr Trump’s team had also been declaring victory publicly in a number of close battleground states, including Pennsylvania and Maine. Maine has since been called for Democrat Joe Biden, while Pennsylvania is still tallying votes.

Currently, the only fact-check under such claims on Facebook is an information box which states: “Final results may be different from the initial vote counts, as ballot counting will continue for days or weeks after polls close.” It does not explicitly call out the president’s claim as false.

It is unclear why Facebook’s initial policy did not account for the fraudulent calling of individual states beforehand, during an election that has repeatedly had its integrity called into account by the president, even before voting began.

Facebook is not the only social media site struggling to deal with fake reports of victory during the presidential election.

On Twitter, Donald Trump falsely declared victory in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina. At time of writing, none of those states have yet been called.

YouTube users searching for live results of the presidential election were also met with incorrect information. 

Eight out of the 20 top results when users searched for "LIVE 2020 Presidential Election Results" presented false information, with many sharing an electoral map showing a predicted victory for Joe Biden as legitimate despite the election not yet ending.

This is despite the company saying it would promote “authoritative” news sources, like CNN and Fox News in search results.

“After careful review, we are removing livestreams that violate our Community Guidelines. We have established policies prohibiting spam, deceptive practices & scams, and we continue to be vigilant with regards to election-related content in the lead-up and post-election period”, YouTube said.