Facebook's new policies on the US election are so narrow that they won't have any real effect on election misinformation that spreads across the site
Steve Kovach / CNBC :
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook has been here before. Back in 2016 it publicly insisted it would not try to influence how people vote — a stance that drew jabs from the Trump campaign and questions from its own staffers (its declared 2016 neutrality). By the 2018 midterms, experts judged its performance decent but noted disinformation still spread fast enough to require outsiders' monitoring and prodding (the midterm post-mortem).
Steve Kovach's CNBC report argues the September 2020 election policies break neither pattern: they are drawn so narrowly, and land so close to voting day, that they leave most election misinformation on the site untouched. The critique matters because it frames what Facebook does next — and in November it did move further, saying it would demote debunked voting claims on Facebook and Instagram and limit election-related Facebook Live distribution (the November tightening).
First-order effects
- Facebook's own platform remains largely exposed to election misinformation through Election Day, since the September rules cover only a narrow slice of content and take effect too late to shape most of what spreads.
- Critics and outside monitors gain a concrete benchmark: the gap between Facebook's announced policies and the misinformation actually circulating becomes the measure against which the company's later moves are judged.
Second-order effects
- The criticism pressures Facebook into successive rounds of escalation, culminating in the November decision to demote debunked voting claims and throttle election-related Live streams — policy arriving reactively rather than ahead of demand.
- Outsiders' monitoring and prodding, already deemed necessary after the 2018 midterms, hardens into a standing role for researchers and press in policing what Facebook's narrow rules miss.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — narrow rules announced late, tightened only after coverage — platform election policy becomes a cycle of reactive patches rather than a durable framework, keeping external scrutiny institutionalized around each US vote.
The trend: Facebook's election-content governance is converging on a reactive cadence — minimal rules up front, broader demotions only under pressure — with outside monitors filling the enforcement gap.