Facebook’s voting labels on candidate posts sow confusion

An example of a post with information about voting. Facebook has started labeling all posts about voting by federal elected officials and candidates in the US. On July 21, 2020, the labels appeared on posts by Trump and by Biden, among others. — Facebook via AP

OAKLAND, California: Facebook has started adding informational labels to all posts about voting by federal elected officials and candidates in the US, as it said it would do. But the move appears to be sowing confusion rather than dispelling it.

This week, the social network applied labels to posts by US president Donald Trump and by Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, among others. The simple labels read “get official voting info” and direct people to a hub with information from authoritative election sources such as state and local officials.