WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 27th June, 2020) Facebook will occasionally allow posts that violate company policies to remain online when newsworthiness outweighs potential harm, albeit with a link notifying users that the message violates company policies, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a press release.
"A handful of times a year, we leave up content that would otherwise violate our policies if the public interest value outweighs the risk of harm. Often, seeing speech from politicians is in the public interest, and in the same way that news outlets will report what a politician says, we think people should generally be able to see it for themselves on our platforms," Zuckerberg said on Friday.
Zuckerberg explained that such content will be labeled as violating Facebook policies, but will remain online, the release said.
"We'll allow people to share this content to condemn it, just like we do with other problematic content, because this is an important part of how we discuss what's acceptable in our society - but we'll add a prompt to tell people that the content they're sharing may violate our policies," the release added.
The policy stems from Facebook's preparations for campaigns ahead of the November elections in the United States.
The release said Facebook will be especially vigilant in removing posts that misinform people on when and how they can vote. For example, if someone identified a city as a novel coronavirus hot spot, Facebook would determine whether the user shared legitimate health information or sought to suppress the turnout at polling stations.
To help users sort out election information, a Voting Information Center will be added at the top of the Facebook and Instagram applications over the coming months.
