Facebook’s Civil Rights Audit consequences (e.g., arrest, deportation, imprisonment).” The Auditors believe expanding its proactive detection to account for a broader set of historical examples should allow Facebook to more rapidly identify more content that violates its existing policies, and better protect communities targeted by voter suppression on its platforms. 6. User Reporting & Reporter Appeals (i) User Reporting. Facebook gives users the option to report content they think goes against the Community Standards. In 2018, Facebook added a new option for users to specifically report “incorrect voting information” they found on Facebook during the US midterm elections. As Facebook’s Voter Interference Policy has evolved to include additional prohibitions beyond incorrect voting information, the Auditors advocated for Facebook to update this reporting option to better reflect the content prohibited under Facebook’s Voter Interference Policy. Facebook has accepted the Auditors’ recommendation and as of June 2020, the reporting option for users now reads “voter interference,” which better tracks the scope of Facebook’s policy. While the Auditors are pleased that Facebook has updated its reporting options to better capture the scope of content prohibited under Facebook’s Voter Interference Policy, the Auditors are concerned that this form of reporting is extremely limited. Currently, content reported by users as voter interference is only evaluated and monitored for aggregate trends. If user feedback indicates to Facebook that the same content or meme is being posted by multiple users and is receiving a high number of user reports, only then will Facebook have the content reviewed by policy and operational teams. This means that most posts reported as “voter interference” are not sent to human content reviewers to make a determination if posts should stay up or be taken down. Facebook justifies this decision by citing its findings during the 2018 midterms, that an extremely low number of reports reviewed by its human reviewers were found to be violating its voter interference policy. In 2018, Facebook observed the vast majority of content reported as “incorrect voting information” were not posts that violated Facebook’s voting policies, but instead were posts by people expressing different political opinions. Facebook reports that during the 2018 midterms, over 90% of the content Facebook removed as violating its voter suppression policy (as it existed at the time) was detected proactively by its technology before a user reported it. Ahead of the 2020 election, Facebook states that it was concerned that sending all reported voter interference content for human review could unintentionally slow its review process and reduce its ability to remove suppressive content by diverting reviewers from assessing and removing content more likely to be violating (i.e., content proactively detected by Facebook or content flagged to Facebook by voting rights groups) to reviewing user reports that Facebook says have in the past often been non-violating and unactionable. As stated previously in the New Partnerships section of this chapter (Section A.2.ii), Facebook indicated it has expanded its program partnering with voting rights organizations, which provides a dedicated channel for partner organizations to flag potentially violating voter interference content. Facebook recognizes these organizations possess unique expertise and in some instances may surface complex or nuanced content missed by its proactive detection. Facebook states that reports generated from this program in combination 32