Facebook’s Civil Rights Audit politicians’ speech will be allowed (and not get removed despite violating Facebook’s content policies) unless the content could lead to real world violence or the harm otherwise outweighs the public’s interest in hearing the speech. These announcements were uniformly criticized in the civil rights community as being dangerously incongruent with the realities of voter suppression. In short, the civil rights community expressed deep concern because politicians have historically been some of the greatest perpetrators of voter suppression in this country. By continuing to exempt them from fact-checking at a time when politicians appear to be increasingly relying on using misinformation, and giving them a presumption of newsworthiness in favor of allowing their speech to remain up, the civil rights community felt like Facebook was inviting opportunities for increased voter suppression. The Auditors shared the civil rights community’s concerns and repeatedly (and vigorously) expressed those concerns directly to Facebook. Facebook has not made any clarifications on the scope of its definition for politicians nor has it made adjustments to its exemption of politicians from fact-checking. However, with respect to its newsworthiness policy, Facebook insists the most common application for its newsworthiness treatment is content that is violating but educational and important for the public’s awareness (e.g., images of children suffering from a chemical weapons attack in Syria). Facebook has since informed the Auditors that over the last year it has only applied “newsworthiness” to speech posted by politicians 15 times globally, with only 1 instance occurring in the United States. Facebook has since clarified that voter interference and census interference as defined under the Coordinating Harm section of the Community Standards are exempt from the newsworthiness policy -- meaning they would not stay up as newsworthy even if expressed by a politician -- and newsworthiness does not apply to ads. After continued engagement by the Auditors and civil rights groups, Facebook recently extended the exemption from newsworthiness to Facebook’s policies prohibiting threats of violence for voting or registering to vote and statements of intent or advocating for people to bring weapons to polling places. There is one voting-related policy where the exemption does not apply. Content could potentially stay up as “newsworthy” even if it violates Facebook policy prohibiting calls for people to be excluded from political participation based on their race, religion or other protected characteristics (e.g., “don’t vote for X Candidate because she’s Black” or “keep Muslims out of Congress”). While the Auditors agree with Facebook’s decision not to allow content violating these other voting policies to stay up as newsworthy, the Auditors urged Facebook to take the same position when politicians violate its policies by making calls for exclusion from political participation on the basis of protected characteristics, and are deeply concerned that Facebook has not done so. The Auditors believe that this exemption is highly problematic and demonstrates a failure to adequately protect democratic processes from racial appeals by politicians during elections. The Auditors continue to have substantial concern about these policies and their potential to be exploited to target specific communities with false information, inaccurate content designed to perpetuate and promote discrimination and stereotypes, and/or for other targeted manipulation, intimidation, or suppression. While Facebook has made progress in other areas related to elections and the Census, to the Auditors, these political speech exemptions constitute significant steps backward that undermine the company’s progress and call into question the company’s priorities. 40