Facebook’s Civil Rights Audit Similarly, the civil rights community viewed the California post as a straightforward misrepresentation of how one gets a ballot — a misrepresentation that if relied upon would trick a user into missing his or her opportunity go obtain a ballot (by failing to register for one). That is the very kind of misrepresentation that Facebook’s policy was supposed to prohibit. As elections approach and updates are made to voting and voter registration methods due to COVID-19, both the civil rights groups and the Auditors worry that Facebook’s narrow policy interpretation will open the floodgates to suppression and false statements tricking people into missing deadlines or other prerequisites to register or vote. In response to the press coverage around these decisions, Mark Zuckerberg has reasserted publicly that platforms should not be “arbiters of truth.” To civil rights groups, those comments suggested the renunciation of Facebook’s Voter Interference Policy; Facebook seemed to be celebrating its refusal to be the “arbiter of truth” on factual assertions regarding what methods of voting are permitted in a state or how one obtains a ballot—despite having a policy that prohibits factual misrepresentations of those very facts. Two weeks after these decisions, and following continuing criticism from members of Congress, employees, and other groups, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would agree to review the company’s policies around voter suppression “to make sure [Facebook is] taking into account the realities of voting in the midst of a pandemic.” Zuckerberg warned, however, that while the company is committing to review its voter suppression policies, that review is not guaranteed to result in changes. Facebook also announced that it would be creating a voting hub (modeled after the COVID-19 hub it created) that would provide authoritative and accurate voting information, as well as tools for registering to vote and encouraging others to do the same. The Auditors strongly encourage Facebook to expeditiously revise or reinterpret its policies to ensure that they prohibit content that labels official voting methods or ballots as illegal, fraudulent, or issued through unofficial channels, and that Facebook prohibit content that misrepresents the steps or requirements for obtaining or submitting a ballot. 2. Announcements Regarding Politicians’ Speech In Fall 2019, Facebook made a series of announcements relating to speech by politicians. These included a September 2019 speech (and accompanying Newsroom Post) in which Nick Clegg, Vice-President for Global Affairs and Communications, stated that Facebook does not subject politicians’ speech to fact-checking, based on the company’s position that it should not “prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny.” Facebook asserts that the fact-checking program was never intended to police politicians’ speech. This public moment in September 2019 brought increased attention and scrutiny to Facebook’s standing guidance to its fact-checking partners that politicians’ direct statements were exempt from fact-checking. In that same speech, Clegg described Facebook’s newsworthiness policy, by which content that otherwise violates Facebook’s Community Standards is allowed to remain on the platform. Clegg clarified that in balancing the public’s interest in the speech against potential harm to determine whether to apply the newsworthiness exception, politicians’ speech is presumed to meet the public interest prong of Facebook’s newsworthy analysis. That is, 39