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Facebook claims it has helped over four million users register to vote

In 2016, that number was less than half.

by
Deep Ballu
October 30, 2020

Image: Erik Mclean on Unsplash

In a recent statement, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that they have helped approximately 4.4 million Americans register to vote. Earlier this year, in June, Facebook and Zukerberg publicly announced that they plan to start a voting information center with the purpose to help 4 million Americans vote.

According to Zuckerberg, they started the biggest voting information campaign in the history of the USA. Compared to their 2016 voting campaign, this campaign is a runaway success because during that time they only managed to register only 1.7 million voters. Based on a CNBC report, in 2018, Facebook helped around 2 million people to register to vote.

Facebook’s information center displayed verified election information for every voter in the US. Furthermore, Facebook also revealed a link that users used to check their voter status or register for voting. In addition, the new center also displayed information on how to vote by mail and other key deadline information.

The reason why Facebook tries hard to advocate and help regular elections is to avoid what happened in the elections in 2016. During the 2016 election, Facebook troll farms were used to influence the outcome of the presidential elections. Facebook later conducted its investigation and revealed that more than 150 million of its users were exposed to some form of fake news or misinformation.

After that, Zuckerberg donated $300 million, and soon after another $100 million. Zuckerberg said that the donations were to improve election security efforts.

So far, around 62 million Americans have opted to vote early. The Associated Press reports that that’s a significant increase compared to the number of early voters four years ago in 2016. Based on the Election Tracking Project, 20 million people voted in person, whereas roughly 42 million voted by mail.

What do you think? How do you feel about Facebook in terms of voter information and inference? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.