Facebook : Our Comprehensive Approach to Protecting the US 2020 Elections Through Inauguration Day

Published: 2021-10-22 20:34:06 ET FB

Long before the US election period began last year, we expected that the 2020 election would be one of the most contentious in history - and that was before we even knew it would be conducted in the midst of a pandemic. We worked since 2016 to invest in people, technologies, policies and processes to ensure that we were ready, and began our planning for the 2020 election itself two years in advance. We built our strategy to run all the way through Inauguration Day in 2021, knowing that there was a high likelihood that the election results would be contested. So we planned specifically for that scenario. This election planning was built upon all of our other integrity work and investments we've made since 2016.

These included:

While that last point is important, as you can see, it was only one part of a much longer series of steps that we took well before, during and after Election Day. When preparing for the election, we planned for multiple potential outcomes and considered many societal factors to understand and respond to violence.

That's a big part of the reason why we developed these additional product levers for extraordinary circumstances, which we called internally "break the glass" measures. That's also why we kept our full suite of systems including many of the "break the glass" measures in place well after Election Day and even after we saw specific signals about potential threats leveling off and more than a month had passed since major news outlets called the election for now-President Joe Biden.

To blame what happened on January 6 on how we implemented just one item of the above list is absurd. We are a significant social media platform so it's only natural for content about major events like that to show up on Facebook. But responsibility for the insurrection itself falls squarely on the insurrectionists who broke the law and those who incited them. We worked with law enforcement in the days and weeks after January 6 with the goal of ensuring that information linking the people responsible for it to their crimes is available. Of course there are always lessons to be learned from the work we do to protect elections and respond to immediate threats and longer-term challenges. We will apply these lessons as we continue doing all of this work.

Disclaimer

Facebook Inc. published this content on 22 October 2021 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 23 October 2021 00:33:04 UTC.