The social network released the second update on its civil rights audit
Facebook said it plans to treat the 2020 census in the U.S. like an election—presumably more like the 2018 midterm elections, which it took several steps to protect, and less like the 2016 presidential election, which was marred by controversies.
The social network’s plans for 2020 were part of its second update (embedded below) to the civil rights audit that civil rights and civil liberties advocate Laura Murphy began conducting more than one year ago, with support from civil rights law firm Relman, Dane and Colfax. The first update was issued last December.
Chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said in a Newsroom post, “With both the U.S. Census and the U.S. presidential elections, 2020 will be big year. An accurate census count is crucial to governments for functions like distributing federal funds and to businesses and researchers. That’s why we’re going to treat next year’s census like an election—with people, policies and technology in place to protect against census interference.”
The social network already has a full-time team in place to protect against election interference, made up of people from its product, engineering, data science, policy, legal and operations teams, and Sandberg said a similar team will be formed dedicated to the census, and policies on census-related misinformation will be crafted.
David Cohen – Ad Week – July 1, 2019.
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