Facebook’s Civil Rights Audit than expected to compile a sufficiently large pool of qualified applicants to conduct a thorough and inclusive hiring process. While Facebook has thoughtfully engaged with external voting rights and census advocates, the Auditors believe that by not onboarding and embedding the consulting experts before the end of 2019, as was originally planned, Facebook lost meaningful opportunities to integrate their guidance and advice into their policy and enforcement decision-making process. B. Response to COVID-19 Pandemic and Impact on Elections/Census The COVID-19 pandemic has had a monumental impact on our country and the world, and will likely continue to do so for some time. In addition to impacting lives, jobs, and our daily existences, the pandemic will have ripple effects on elections, voting, and the census — the full implications of which are not yet certain. Accordingly, while not a planned Audit Report topic, because of COVID-19’s potential impact on voting and the census, an update on Facebook’s COVID response in these areas is warranted. Impact on Voter/Census Suppression & Enforcement As the pandemic spread, Facebook recognized the possibility of new forms of voter and census suppression relating to the virus. Facebook focused resources on detecting such content and proactively provided content reviewers with clear enforcement guidance on how its policies applied to COVID to ensure that violating content would be removed. For example, Facebook took steps to ensure that content reviewers were trained to remove, as violations of Facebook’s voter and census interference policies, false statements that the election or census had been cancelled because of COVID-19. Facebook has detected and removed various forms of suppressive content related to COVID, such as false statements about the timing of elections or methods for voting or participating in the census. Facebook says that from March to May 2020, it removed more than 100,000 pieces of Facebook and Instagram content in the US (a majority of which were COVID-related) for violating its voter interference policies – virtually all of which were removed proactively before being reported. While Facebook closed many of its physical content review locations as a result of the pandemic and sent contract content reviewers home for their own safety (while continuing to pay them), Facebook has made clear this shift should not negatively impact its ability to enforce elections and census-related policies. Facebook indicates that unlike some other policies, the content reviewers that help enforce Facebook’s elections and census policies include full-time Facebook employees (in addition to contract reviewers) who are able to work remotely. Facebook’s elections and census policies are also enforced in part via proactive detection, which is not impacted by the closing of content review sites. Because COVID-19 has resulted in changes to election times and voting methods, Facebook has focused on both removing voting misinformation and proactively disseminating correct voting information. This includes providing notices (via banners in News Feed) to users in areas where voting by mail is available to everyone, or where there have been last-minute changes to the election. For example, when the Ohio Primary was postponed at the last minute 26