<p>Facebook will prohibit new political ads during the final week of the 2020 election campaign, announced CEO Mark Zuckerberg this week.</p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">The social media site is also planning to flag false claims of victory by either candidate before results are finalized, limit the number of messages that can be sent through its Messenger platform, and remove posts claiming that people will catch COVID if they vote in person. </span><span class="s1">On Election Day, Facebook users will be urged to visit the site’s “voting information center” to see results sourced from Reuters.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">Zuckerberg claims these policy changes are designed to reduce the spread of misinformation, but what he’s really doing is restricting information to the site’s 2.7 billion monthly active users during the most important week of the race.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">“In the last seven days of the most important election in our history, President Trump will be banned from defending himself on the largest platform in America,” argued Trump campaign spokesperson Samantha Zager. “When millions of voters will be making their decisions, the President will be silenced by the Silicon Valley Mafia.”</span></p>
<p class="p2"><em><span class="s1">Not surprisingly, Joe Biden’s campaign made no comment on Zuckerberg’s announcement. </span></em></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">“This election is not going to be business as usual,” said Zuckerberg. “I’m worried that with our nation so divided and election results potentially taking days or even weeks to be finalized, there could be an increased risk of civil unrest across the county.”</span></p>
<p class="p2"><em><span class="s1">The coronavirus pandemic and the resulting increase in absentee voting are expected to cause delays, but it is not Zuckerberg’s responsibility to interfere.</span></em></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">“We’re going to take this seriously and make sure that people aren’t declaring victory and saying that any kind of ongoing counting of votes is evidence of a rigged election or anything like that,” added Zuckerberg. “I think that that would be dangerous…And I think it could risk increasing, you know, people getting into the streets and civil unrest after the election, which I think would be very problematic.”</span></p>
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<p class="p2"><span class="s1">The image-sharing platform Pinterest (which already prohibits political ads) is also making moves to limit what information is available to voters ahead of the election. On Thursday, the site announced it would block ads to voters searching for election-related terms like “Trump,” “Biden,” and “vote.”</span></p>
<p>These dangerous moves by Facebook and Pinterest will only strengthen Trump&#8217;s <span class="s1">concerns about election integrity and the widespread suppression of Republican votes. Earlier this week, he posted a Facebook message urging supporters to </span><span class="s1">vote by mail and in person to test the flawed mail-in balloting system. His post was immediately flagged with this message from Facebook: &#8220;</span><span class="s1">Voting by mail has a long history of trustworthiness in the US and the same is predicted this year.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1"><strong>Author&#8217;s Note:</strong> Social media sites should not have the authority to control election information. Mark Zuckerberg is an egomaniac who believes his opinions are more important than free speech and his efforts to restrict information must be stopped.</span></p>