Facebook CEO Zuckerberg calls 2020 election 'test'
The U.S. 2020 election will be a "test" for Facebook, said chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on the company's third-quarter earnings call.
And he again warned of the potential for delayed election results because of increased use of mail-in ballots.
"I'm worried that with our nation so divided and election results potentially taking days or weeks to be finalized, there is a risk of civil unrest across the country," he said. "Given this, companies like ours need to go well beyond what we've done before."
Facebook has faced criticism for its handling of the 2016 election, when it became clear in the weeks following that Russian and other foreign entities had used the platform to attempt to influence the election.
This time around, Zuckerberg said that the company had built best-in-class technical systems over the last four years to tackle threats, and had created new policies in anticipation of civil unrest during the election. The company will label posts with premature declarations of victory to authoritative information. It has blocked new political ads in the week before the election and all political ads during the week after, and said it estimates that Facebook helped more than 4.4 million people to register to vote.
Facebook has banned conspiracy group QAnon, as well as ads that discourage people from taking vaccines, Zuckerberg said.
The CEO emphasized that his beliefs in free speech had not wavered - a nod to political criticism from the pro-free speech right - but said that the company was balancing its approach to emphasize safety. "To be clear, this is not a shift in our underlying philosophy or strong support of free expression."
Separately, Facebook said it is also benefiting from a pandemic-driven acceleration of e-commerce as businesses race to replace lost revenue from shuttered brick-and-mortar stores.
Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said that the company was benefiting from dramatic shifts in consumer behavior during the pandemic.
"Before the pandemic, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, eCommerce's share of U.S. retail sales was steadily increasing by an average of 1 percentage point a year for the past 4 years," she said. "This share leapt by 4 percentage points in Q2 alone - that's 4 years of change in less than 100 days."