Facebook tool for finding voting misinfo falls short, study says

Facebook has been criticised for failing to enforce its voting misinformation policy against Trump, who has used the service to share misleading information about vote-by-mail efforts in various US states. — Dreamstime/TNS

A Facebook Inc tool that US state election officials are using to find and report voting misinformation doesn’t effectively monitor most posts on the social media service, including those in private groups or from most individual users, according to a watchdog group’s report.

Facebook has been encouraging elections authorities to use CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned content-monitoring system, to find voting misinformation in their states. CrowdTangle’s dashboard covers public Facebook pages and groups but “doesn’t include posts from most individual users or from private Facebook groups”, according to the report from the Tech Transparency Project. It also doesn’t include content from Instagram accounts with fewer than 75,000 followers.