Amid a 2018 civil-rights audit of the company, Facebook came under pressure to consider a novel set of questions about its role in politics: What does voter suppression look like on social media? And, in the absence of U.S. legislation on the subject, should the company set the rules to ensure that voter suppression does not occur, in any form and at any level, in the digital world?
Voter suppression has been defined traditionally as efforts to discourage or prevent certain groups of people from voting. But in the digital world, it is much more complicated. On social media, the most obvious forms include posting false information about dates, locations, and voting procedures, and those are relatively easy to combat with the proper mix of machine learning and human review.
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