Facebook would have deleted 265,000 posts around US elections

Facebook would have removed 265,000 posts around the US presidential election and rejected around 3.3 million ads. That would be stated in a confidential report from Facebook addressed to politicians in the US.

In the 22-page report, Facebook lists what it has done to counter election bias on its platform, Bloomberg reports. Many of the cases were already public, but the numbers for deleted posts and rejected ads were not yet. The financial news agency does not provide further statistics on the deleted posts and rejected ads, such as what they were about.

Facebook is calling for more government rules around elections. “Elections should have rules around critical issues set by democracies, not private corporations. We hope Washington can make progress next year in updating rules for the Internet.” Facebook is probably referring to rules that indicate what is and is not allowed around elections on social media. Now Facebook and Twitter had different rules, whereby posts from politicians were blocked on one platform and not on the other.

In this US presidential election, social media has focused more on countering misleading information and fake news on their platforms. In the elections four years ago, many critics said that Facebook had played a role in the spread of fake news around the election and the company promised improvement.