Facebook Adjusts News Overview to Unrest Around US Elections

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Facebook is preparing to adjust its news feed if unrest breaks out over next week’s presidential election in the United States.

The interventions must ensure that posts that stir up unrest are no longer distributed.

This is a set of measures that Facebook previously implemented in Myanmar, among others, writes The Wall Street Journal. The intention is that Facebook will not play a role in this way in the distribution of posts that incite riots.

The measures could cause tens of millions of Americans to see a different news feed after logging in, the paper said.

The algorithm applies a “lower” limit to what the software sees as dangerous posts about elections in risk countries, the newspaper reports. This makes it possible to limit more posts to reach more quickly so as not to stir up unrest in a country further.

In September, Facebook already announced that it would only allow political advertisements of the winner of the election when the official results of the election were shared by the Reuters news agency and the National Election Pool (NEP), a collective of American news media.