Facebook’s Civil Rights Audit Chapter Two: Elections & Census 2020 With both a presidential election and a decennial census, 2020 is an incredibly important year for Facebook to focus on preventing suppression and intimidation, improving policy enforcement, and shoring up its defenses against coordinated threats and interference. As such, the Audit Team has prioritized Facebook’s election and census policies, practices, and monitoring and enforcement infrastructure since the last report. The current COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on Americans’ ability to engage in all forms of civic participation. Understandably, it has changed how elections and the census are carried out and has influenced the flow of information about how to participate in both. On social media, in particular, the pandemic has led candidates and elected officials to find new ways to reach their communities online, but it has also prompted misinformation and new tactics designed to suppress participation, making Facebook’s preparation and responsiveness more important than ever. This chapter provides an update on Facebook’s prior elections and census commitments (made in the June 2019 Audit Report), describes Facebook’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic as it relates to elections and census, and details new commitments and developments. Facebook has made consequential improvements directed at promoting census and voter participation, addressing suppression, preventing foreign interference, and increasing transparency, the details of which are described below. This report is also transparent about the places where the Auditors believe that the company has taken harmful steps backward on suppression issues, primarily in its decision to exempt politicians’ speech from fact checking, and its failure to remove viral posts, such as those by President Trump, that the Auditors (and the civil rights community) believe are in direct violation of the company’s voter suppression policies. A. Update on Prior Elections and Census Commitments In the June 2019 Audit Report, Facebook made commitments to develop or improve voting and census-related policies and build out its elections/census operations, resources, and planning. Updates on these commitments are provided below. 1. Policy Improvements (i) Prohibiting Census Suppression and Interference. After listening to repeated feedback and concern raised by stakeholders about census interference on social media, in 2019, Facebook committed to treating the 2020 census like an election, which included developing and launching a census interference policy designed to protect the census from suppression and interference as the company has done for voting. Facebook made good on its policy commitment. Through a months-long process involving the Audit Team, the US Census Bureau, civil rights groups, and census experts, Facebook developed a robust census interference policy, which was formally launched in December 2019. The census interference policy extends beyond mere misrepresentations of how and when to fill out the census to the types of threats of harm or negative consequences that census experts identify as particularly 20