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      in US Politics

      Steve Bannon banned by Twitter for calling for Fauci beheading

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      Twitter has banned the account of the former Donald Trump adviser and surrogate Steve Bannon after he called for the beheading of Dr Anthony Fauci and the FBI director, Christopher Wray, and the posting of their heads outside the White House as a “warning”.
      Speaking on his podcast, the War Room, which was distributed in video form on a number of social media outlets, the far-right provocateur appeared to endorse violence against Wray and the US’s most senior infectious diseases expert.
      “Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci … no I actually want to go a step farther but the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man,” Bannon said.
      “I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I’d put their heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the programme or you’re gone.”
      Twitter banned Bannon’s War Room account permanently, saying it had suspended the podcast account for violating its policy on the glorification of violence.
      The same video was on Facebook for about 10 hours before it was also removed.
      Later on Friday, William Burck, an attorney for Bannon in a fraud case in New York City, told a federal judge he was withdrawing. Bannon is accused of misappropriating money from a group which raised $2m from thousands of donors to build a wall on the border with Mexico, and has pleaded not guilty. Burck did not give a reason for his withdrawal.
      There has been mounting concern over the risk of violence following this week’s US elections, amid highly inflammatory rhetoric from Trump and his allies, who have falsely said Democrats are trying to “steal the election”.
      Philadelphia police arrested two men allegedly involved in a plot to attack the Pennsylvania Convention Center on Thursday night. Police were tipped off, possibly from a concerned family member of one of the men, who had driven 300 miles from Virginia.
      The moves against Bannon came hours after Facebook banned “Stop the Steal”, a group involved in organising protests this weekend throughout the US against the presidential vote count.
      One post, shared by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, declared: “Neither side is going to concede. Time to clean the guns, time to hit the streets.”
      The increasingly heated language around the election has also included interventions from more mainstream figures, including the former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich, who appeared to call for election workers in Pennsylvania to be arrested.
      [embedded content]
      Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox News, Gingrich amplified Trump’s false complaints of election rigging and mused about what he believed was the solution.
      “My hope is that President Trump will lead the millions of Americans who understand exactly what’s going on,” Gingrich said. “The Philadelphia machine is corrupt. The Atlanta machine is corrupt. The machine in Detroit is corrupt. And they are trying to steal the presidency. And we should not allow them to do that.”
      “First of all, under federal law, we should lock up the people who are breaking the law,” he continued. “You stop somebody from being an observer, you just broke federal law. Do you hide and put up papers so nobody can see what you’re doing? You just broke federal law. You bring in ballots that aren’t real? You just broke federal law.” More

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      in Elections

      CNN’s John King and his ‘magic wall’ keep viewers entranced

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      As the US election has dragged on and people remain glued to their screens, a new type of celebrity has emerged: the results analyst. And none has been more popular than CNN’s John King.
      King, CNN’s chief national correspondent since 2005, has been a nearly constant presence for viewers, fronting the broadcaster’s “magic wall” tirelessly through the week.
      With the coronavirus pandemic leading to vastly more postal votes, which take longer to process than in-person ballots, analysts such as King and MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki have become the must-watch stars of the small screen. The Los Angeles Times has said King’s indefatigable efforts and insight have made him the election’s “MVP”.
      King, who said he managed just two-and-a-half hours’ sleep on election night and four hours on Wednesday, has fronted The Wall at every election since 2008. A giant interactive touchscreen that allows CNN anchors to see up-to-date voting detail by district and to analyse every possible voting permutation, The Wall has come into its own as this year’s vote count drags on.
      The 59-year old has fronted The Wall for 12- to 14-hour shifts on-screen, dissecting updates county by county and state by state, and informing viewers of the changing “pathways” for Donald Trump and Joe Biden to reach the 270 electoral votes needed to make it to the White House. More

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      in Elections

      Fox draws Trump campaign's ire after calling Arizona for Biden

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      When Donald Trump supporters gathered outside a vote-counting centre in Phoenix, Arizona, on Wednesday night, they had a simple and perhaps unexpected chant: “Fox News Sucks!”
      Although the channel has become synonymous with Trump’s rise to power, in the last two days Fox News has become the focus of the Trump campaign’s anger after it made an early call on Tuesday night that the state of Arizona was going to Joe Biden.
      In the process, the channel switched the media’s attention away from Trump’s substantial success in Florida and undermined the president’s attempts to focus attention on the vote counting in Pennsylvania.
      Such was the level of fury within the Trump campaign at the call that his team reportedly attempted to have the decision overturned. According to the New York Times, this involved Jared Kushner contacting Fox’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, while in Vanity Fair’s reporting it was the president himself who called the media mogul. Regardless of who was placing the calls, Fox has stuck by its decision – much to the anger of many of its viewers who have bombarded the channel with complaints.

      The decision to call the ultra-close Arizona race for Biden – a victory that was later also declared by the Associated Press, which provides results data to the Guardian – was made by Fox’s Arnon Mishkin, who runs the broadcaster’s decision desk. Before the election, Mishkin, a registered Democrat who has worked for Fox News for decades, had made clear that he would not be swayed by internal pressure in making calls for states.
      As a result, Mishkin has been portrayed as a defender of the truth, representing the uneasy balance that exists between Fox’s straight news division and the highly opinionated rightwing hosts who shape the external perception of the channel.
      On Thursday, Mishkin, who has become a target for angry Trump supporters, told the channel’s viewers that he would not be changing his mind on the basis that “we strongly believe that our call will stand, and that’s why we’re not pulling back the call”.
      Dismissing claims from Trump’s team that they could still edge ahead in the ultra-close race as more votes were counted, a visibly exasperated Mishkin pushed back and said the objections were like talking about what would happen “if a frog had wings”.
      “We’re confident that the data will basically look like the data we’ve noticed throughout the count in Arizona,” he said.

      Trump and his team have an increasingly complicated relationship with Fox News. Throughout his presidency he has been an obsessive watcher of the channel, often providing commentary on his Twitter feed about its audience ratings when he objects to its coverage and phoning in to dispute specific issues.
      On the day of the election he complained on air about the channel’s coverage not being sufficiently supportive: “Somebody said what’s the difference between this and four years ago, and I say Fox … In the old days you wouldn’t put ‘Sleepy Joe’ on every time he opens his mouth. You had Democrats on more than you had Republicans. I’m not complaining. I’m just telling people.”
      One of the bigger questions in US rightwing media is what happens if Trump loses the election, with longstanding speculation that he could be tempted to start his own media outlet in a bid to communicate directly with his supporters. More

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      in US Politics

      Facebook and Twitter take emergency steps against Trump false victory claims

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      Facebook and Twitter have deployed emergency measures to counter Donald Trump’s false claims of victory on their social networks, bringing them more directly into conflict with the US president than ever before.The two tech platforms had announced plans in the run-up to the election to counter misinformation about the vote, as well as premature claims of victory, and on the night of and day after, both companies mostly stuck to the plan.Facebook notably dropped the euphemistic phrasing that had previously accompanied its announcements, which discussed the risk that “candidates” may falsely claim a win. It also walked back a previous policy that would have allowed candidates to claim state-level victories before they were called, despite barring the premature announcement of a national win. On Wednesday it started to flag posts from Trump and affiliates claiming the president had won Pennsylvania and other battleground states, even as ballots continued to be counted and official results had yet to be announced.A company spokesperson cited Trump by name in explaining its decision, saying: “Once President Trump began making premature claims of victory, we started running notifications on Facebook and Instagram that votes are still being counted and a winner is not projected. We’re also automatically applying labels to both candidates’ posts with this information.”When it came to reacting to individual posts, both platforms faced criticism for their responses. In late-night posts cross-posted to both Twitter and Facebook, Trump declared: “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!” That post was followed by a second that read: “I will be making a statement tonight. A big WIN!”Misinformation experts say because such posts are able to achieve widespread circulation before being addressed, more comprehensive policies to correct the effects of the misleading posts should be put in place, calling it a “democratic emergency”.“False claims of voter fraud, early victory and election-stealing are helping plunge the country further into chaos and confusion, creating alternate realities for Americans,” said Fadi Quran, the campaign director at Avvaz, an online activist network and non-profit. “Platforms must immediately adopt more effective policies such as retroactively sending corrections to all users who see misinformation and downgrading the reach of repeat misinformers.”Facebook initially labelled the first post with a simple box advising readers to “see the latest updates on the 2020 US election”. More than 30 minutes after it was posted, the company updated its warning to note that “final results may be different from initial vote counts, as ballot counting will continue for days or weeks”. By that time the post had well over 100,000 reactions.Twitter restricted distribution on the first post from Trump on Tuesday night, blocking it from being retweeted or replied to, and appended a note saying the content “is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process”. A spokesperson said the warning was “for making a potentially misleading claim about an election. This action is in line with our civic integrity policy.”Neither platform took specific action against the second post claiming “a big WIN!”. Twitter said the lack of action was because it was unclear what, specifically, was being referenced. While the post could have constituted a premature claim of victory in the national race, it could just as easily be construed as a legitimate expression of pleasure at winning a state such as Florida, which had declared several hours earlier. More

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      in Elections

      ‘It’s not up to him’: how media outlets plan to sidestep any Trump ‘victory’ news

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      Newsrooms across the United States are bracing for a potentially volatile election night, after reports suggested that Donald Trump is planning to declare “victory” on Tuesday even before results from critical battleground states have been determined.
      The president’s reported intention to make a premature – and potentially false – victory speech by the end of Tuesday night, with large numbers of mail-in ballots yet to be counted, has provoked intense journalistic debate. TV channels would be under pressure to air such an event on grounds that it is “news”, while aware that it amounted to dangerous misinformation that could stir violence across the nation and undermine the democratic process.
      Such a clash of responsibilities would amount to a heady climax in the American media’s extremely vexed relationship with Trump over the past four years.
      Were Trump to try to stage such a “victory” stunt it would chime with the relentless doubt that he has sown for months around the election, with repeated false claims that mail-in voting is riddled with fraud. His comments suggest that his aim is to create the illusion that the election is being stolen from him in states such as Pennsylvania where early results from in-person voting might favor Trump in a so-called “red mirage”, only for the balance to swing to Biden as absentee ballots are counted beyond election day.
      As Jake Tapper, chief Washington correspondent for CNN, pointed out, any premature claim of victory would be electorally meaningless, the equivalent of a football coach bragging about having won at half-time. “That’s not how it works and it’s not up to him,” Tapper said in a tweet.
      But it would still present media outlets with a classic Trump conundrum. How do you cover a presidential “victory” speech that is founded upon hot air yet has the potential to cause serious public discord?
      Vivian Schiller, a former president and CEO of National Public Radio who was also NBC News’s chief digital officer, said that news organizations have no excuse for being unprepared for such an eventuality. Headlines such as “Trump declares victory”, especially on social media, could “shape public opinion and become a weapon against truth and trust in the democratic process,” she told the Guardian.

      Schiller, who in her current role as executive director of Aspen Digital has co-written a 10-point plan for news rooms on how to cover a historically toxic election, proposed that TV channels should actively counter any Trump gambit. One technique would be to display a fixed on-screen banner reminding viewers that the votes are still being counted with no winner yet declared.
      “If Trump goes on for more than a minute or two with falsehoods, cut away from the live feed and have your reporters explain that elections are not ‘called’ by their contestants,” she said. “Explain why such a premature declaration of victory is both wrong and dangerous.”
      Jay Rosen, journalism professor at New York University, responded to the Axios story by calling on newsrooms to step up and meet the challenge. A premature Trump “victory” declaration would be the most important test yet of what he called the “fading maxim” that whatever the US president says is news.
      That maxim, Rosen said on Twitter, was “corroded beyond repair by its abuser”.
      Election night is also likely to present the social media giants with challenges, after they struggled to counter misinformation throughout the presidential election cycle.
      Late on Monday, Twitter and Facebook announced that they would flag posts from candidates who claim to have won the election before the votes have been counted.
      In Twitter’s case, a warning label on the tweet will say “Official sources called this election differently”, or that “Official sources may not have called the race when this was tweeted”. Users would still be able to quote tweet the post, but not to like or retweet it.
      The company says it will consider a result official after it has been declared by a state election official, or confirmed by two or more of a list of news outlets including Fox, CNN and the Associated Press.
      Facebook’s warning labels, applied on both Facebook and Instagram, will state that “votes are being counted. The winner of the 2020 US presidential election has not been projected.” The company has also updated its “voting information centre”, which was that “Some election results may not be available for days or weeks. This means things are happening as expected.”
      “Election officials will get the vote count right, and slower results reporting does not mean wrong or fraudulent results,” Facebook advises its users. “All Americans need to give election officials the time to do their jobs right.” More

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      in Elections

      'Putin could only dream of it': how Trump became the biggest source of disinformation in 2020

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      [embedded content]
      It seemed like the nightmare of 2016 all over again.
      On 21 October, less than two weeks before election day, US intelligence and law enforcement officials convened a last-minute press conference to warn that foreign adversaries were once again interfering in American democracy. Iran was spreading false tales about “allegedly fraudulent ballots” and sending spoofed emails purporting to contain threats from the Proud Boys, “designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest and damage President Trump”, said John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence. Meanwhile, both Russia and Iran had obtained access to voter information that could be used to “cause confusion, sow chaos and undermine your confidence in American democracy”, he warned.
      It was everything that Democrats and disinformation experts have been warning about for the last four years, except, well, not quite.
      The email operation had been relatively small and immediately debunked, while voter roll information is either public or easy to obtain. Senior intelligence officials quickly raised doubts about Ratcliffe’s emphasis on the threat from Iran over Russia and questioned whether his motives for the public announcement were political, the New York Times reported.
      “It was very difficult to see those men in suits talking about interference in the election when the White House is the one interfering with the election,” said Claire Wardle, the executive director of First Draft, a group that researches and combats disinformation.
      After all, when it comes to intimidating voters or inciting social unrest, nothing has had more impact than the constant drumbeat of lies and disinformation from Donald Trump. Years of preparation by the press, social media platforms, and civil society groups for a foreign interference campaign against the US electoral process have been upended by the bizarre reality that the biggest threat to American democracy right now is almost certainly the commander-in-chief, and that his primary mode of attack is a concerted disinformation campaign.
      Because how much impact can a few thousand faked emails telling voters in Florida and Alaska to “vote for Trump or else” have on voters compared with Trump directly ordering the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist street gang, to “stand back and stand by” before a television audience of 73 million people? And what kind of false tale of voter fraud could Iran possibly seed that could undermine Americans’ faith in the electoral process more than the disinformation about voter fraud and mail-in ballots coming straight from the White House and Trump’s campaign?
      “‘Don’t trust the electoral system, don’t trust the CDC, don’t trust your neighbor because they’re probably antifa, don’t trust the left,’” Wardle said of Trump’s re-election message. “It’s not about persuading people one way or the other, it’s about making them scared and causing confusion and chaos,” she added.
      “The media’s been obsessed with Russians under the bed, but to have the president of the United States telling people in the US that they can’t trust the results of the election – Putin could only dream of that kind of thing.”
      Social media tactics
      Russia’s disinformation campaign in the 2016 presidential election had two main vectors: a social media campaign to sow division and distrust among voters, and a “hack and leak” operation that resulted in the theft and publication of emails and documents stolen from Democrats and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. That hack and leak operation was incredibly successful, with caches of stolen material proving irresistible both for the mainstream press and for conservative activists and conspiracy theorists.
      The 2020 iteration of the hack and leak tactic – Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani pushing dubious emails and text messages supposedly obtained from a hard drive linked to Joe Biden’s son Hunter – has been something of a damp squib, however. “You don’t see the same kind of credulous, knee-jerk out-of-control amplification that you saw in 2016,” said Whitney Phillips, a professor at Syracuse University and author of The Oxygen of Amplification, a report examining how the press served the purposes of media manipulators, trolls and hate groups in 2016. The top newspapers have debunked and deflated Giuliani’s claims, and the idea of the pilfered hard drive has failed to capture the public’s interest in the same way that troves of stolen emails did.
      But while the Trump re-election campaign may have failed to recapture the magic of 2016 when it comes to hacked emails, the president has taken Russia’s 2016 social media playbook and supercharged it with the power of the White House.
      “I’m sure that there is some foreign influence stuff happening and we might know more about it later,” said Phillips. “But so much of the pollution is trickling down from the White House itself, and people have been absolutely overwhelmed with falsehoods and confusion over Covid and ballots … When people get overwhelmed, they either fight or flee. [Trump] is making it almost impossible for people not to get totally burned out and disgusted.” More

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      in US Politics

      The media has mostly not taken the bait on dubious Biden claims – with some Australia-linked exceptions | Jason Wilson

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      The big difference between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections is that this time, mainstream media outlets are mostly not taking the bait on a dubiously sourced set of digital materials associated with the Democratic candidate.Outside the rightwing bubble, the exceptions are disproportionately connected with Australia: Australian writers, Australian outlets, and/or outlets associated with News Corporation, who, like its founder, has Australian origins.The New York Post, a News Corp tabloid, has been leading the pursuit of the story of a data cache which is purportedly a copy of the hard drive of a computer belonging to Hunter Biden. They’ve not had much support from other established newspapers, but News Corp’s Fox News and a flotilla of lesser conservative media outlets have been dutifully amplifying and even adding their own touches to the tale.On Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on Wednesday night US time, for example, the host implied that documents associated with the story, which his editorial team had shipped across the country, may have been stolen by people trying to shut down reporting on the cache.The Daily Beast reported on Thursday, however, that freight company UPS had simply misdirected the package, which has been recovered.The original New York Post Biden piece had huge problems on arrival, so much so that a journalist there reportedly refused to add their byline to it.The chain of custody was one of the issues. The data supposedly came from a computer, dropped off by an unidentified person, who was presumed but not positively determined to be Hunter Biden by the owner of a computer store in Delaware.That man’s story of how he retrieved the data from the machine and how he came to give it to the authorities and Rudy Giuliani has shifted. The FBI subpoenaed a computer from the store, which is reportedly connected to a money-laundering investigation, but it’s impossible to compare that machine with the supposed copy.Anyone who reports on leaked digital materials, as I have, knows that it is trivially easy to fake, modify, subtract from or add to, and otherwise mess around with any documents in any cache. Some documents carry indelible marks, such as any emails that are signed with DKIM security signatures, but everything else can be messed with.In this case, we haven’t seen the originals, just PDF printouts, and the New York Post has not been forthcoming with any detailed or satisfactory account of its own authentication process. It hasn’t said how it determined the authenticity of the cache as a whole, or individual items it has reported on, and has continued handwaving about the FBI subpoena, and the lack of denials from the Biden camp.If it does know for sure that the material is a genuine copy of Biden’s laptop, it isn’t letting on how. At least some of the material appears to be authentic. A sex tape released last week, for example, appears to really feature Hunter Biden. But that doesn’t mean that Giuliani has it because Hunter Biden took all that data to the computer shop. We still don’t really know who put them together, how, and for what purpose.This explains the queasiness of most mainstream outlets – of whom Giuliani told the New York Times that “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.” The Wall Street Journal and Fox News were both reportedly offered elements of the story, and each refused.(One of Fox’s news anchors, Chris Wallace, commented that “I can understand the concern about this story. It is completely unverified and frankly, Rudy Giuliani is not the most reliable source anymore. I hate to say that, but it’s just true.”)None of this appears to have been a concern for the leadership at the New York Post, which once again now includes Col Allan, its Australian-born one-time editor in chief, and an outspoken Trump supporter. Allan retired in 2016 but is now back there as a special adviser, and was reportedly leading the charge to publish the material quickly.Once they pushed it out, Fox News started running with the pack that the Post had whistled up.So too, at crucial moments, did Australia’s News Corp outlets. On Sunday 18 October, Sharri Markson hosted Steve Bannon on her Sunday evening program. Bannon crowed about an email from Hunter Biden’s lawyer which supposedly showed him asking for the computer back.Bannon told Markson that the lawyer called the shop owner, “and when the guy said I can’t remember, I’m going back to my shop, he sent a couple of emails in a panic saying ‘I’ve got to get my hands on this right away’”.That email was subsequently released by a Fox reporter, and merely contained a request that the proprietor “review your records” on the matter. The lawyer, meanwhile, is on record saying that the Bidens “have no idea” where the email came from.Markson’s show, like most of Sky’s fare, is not widely watched. But she’s willing to have Bannon on. One might say that he couldn’t get arrested in the US, except that he recently was, and charged with fraud in connection with a border wall crowdfunding scheme, aboard the mega-yacht of his reported employer, Guo Wengui, whose bitter fight with the Chinese government has driven him into exile.Giuliani’s material was good enough for News Corp’s post; Bannon’s record apparently posed no concerns to News Corp’s Markson. News Corp’s Australian commentariat, and expatriate New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, have all assisted in pushing the story, and pushing back on criticism.While most media outlets had a reckoning after 2016, it didn’t extend to crucial parts of News Corporation, including the most prominent faces of its Australian operation. More

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      in US Politics

      Facebook leak reveals policies on restricting New York Post's Biden story

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      Facebook moderators had to manually intervene to suppress a controversial New York Post story about Hunter Biden, according to leaked moderation guidelines seen by the Guardian.The document, which lays out in detail Facebook’s policies for dealing with misinformation on Facebook and Instagram, sheds new light on the process that led to the company’s decision to reduce the distribution of the story.“This story is eligible to be factchecked by Facebook’s third-party factchecking partners,” Facebook’s policy communications director, Andy Stone, said at the time. “In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform. This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation. We temporarily reduce distribution pending factchecker review.”In fact, the documents show, the New York Post – like most major websites – was given special treatment as part of Facebook’s standard process. Stories can be “enqueued” for Facebook’s third-party factcheckers in one of two ways: either by being flagged by an AI, or by being manually added by one of the factcheckers themselves.Facebook’s AI looks for signals “including feedback from the community and disbelief comments” to automatically predict which posts might contain misinformation. “Predicted content is temporarily (for seven days) soft demoted in feed (at 50% strength) and enqueued to fact check product for review by [third-party factcheckers],” the document says.But some posts are not automatically demoted. Sites in the “Alexa 5K” list, “which includes content in the top 5,000 most popular internet sites”, are supposed to keep their distribution high, “under the assumption these are unlikely to be spreading misinformation”.Those guidelines can be manually overridden, however. “In some cases, we manually enqueue content … either with or without temporary demotion. We can do this on escalation and based on whether the content is eligible for fact-checking, related to an issue of importance, and has an external signal of falsity.” The US election is such an “issue of importance”.In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said: “As our CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress earlier this week, we have been on heightened alert because of FBI intelligence about the potential for hack and leak operations meant to spread misinformation. Based on that risk, and in line with our existing policies and procedures, we made the decision to temporarily limit the content’s distribution while our factcheckers had a chance to review it. When that didn’t happen, we lifted the demotion.”The guidelines also reveal Facebook had prepared a “break-glass measure” for the US election, allowing its moderators to apply a set of policies for “repeatedly factchecked hoaxes” (RFH) to political content. “For a claim to be included as RFH, it must meet eligibility criteria (including falsity, virality and severity) and have content policy leadership approval.”The policy, which to the Guardian’s knowledge has not yet been applied, would lead to Facebook blocking viral falsehoods about the election without waiting for them to be debunked each time a new version appeared. A similar policy about Covid-19 hoaxes is enforced by “hard demoting the content, applying a custom inform treatment, and rejecting ads”.Facebook acts only on a few types of misinformation without involving third-party factcheckers, the documents reveal. Misinformation aimed at voter or census interference is removed outright “because of the severity of the harm to democratic systems”. Manipulated media, or “deepfakes”, are removed “because of the difficulty of ‘unseeing’ content so sophisticatedly edited”. And misinformation that “contributes to imminent violence or physical harm” is removed because of the security of imminent physical harm.The latter policy is not normally applied by ground-level moderation staff, but a special exception has been made for misinformation about Covid-19, the document says. Similar exceptions have been made to misinformation about polio in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to misinformation about Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.Facebook also has a unique policy around vaccine hoaxes. “Where groups and pages spread these widely debunked hoaxes about vaccinations two or more times within 90 days, those groups and pages will be demoted in search results, all of their content will be demoted in news feed, they will be pulled from recommendation systems and type-ahead in search, and pages may have their access to fundraising tools revoked,” the document reads.“This policy is enforced by Facebook and not third-party factcheckers. Thus, our policy of not subjecting politician speech to factchecking does NOT apply here. If a politician shares hoaxes about vaccines we will enforce on that content.” More