Has Facebook lost its voting drive?

[Bloomberg]( Follow Us //link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/click/21258317.61570/aHR0cHM6Ly90d2l0dGVyLmNvbS90ZWNobm9sb2d5/582c8673566a94262a8b49bdBb28b7faf [Get the newsletter]( Hey all, it’s Kurt. Facebook Inc. and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg have [promised]( to carry out the “largest voting information campaign in American history” – a pledge that includes a goal to register 4 million new voters ahead of November’s election. But a [new report]( Wednesday from the Tech Transparency Project called Facebook’s commitment into question based on internal emails obtained through public-records requests. Among the findings: Facebook scaled back a July 4 voting drive, cutting the two-day event to one day. It ran the campaign on Facebook, but not Instagram or Messenger as originally intended, and has not yet put the official voting hub atop user feeds as Zuckerberg promised to do back in June. When officials from Illinois asked the company to add language about mail-in voting to the campaign for users in their state, Facebook declined, saying it wanted to “generalize” the language instead. The Trump campaign criticized Facebook’s registration efforts a few weeks before the July 4 drive, and Trump himself is crusading against mail-in ballots. That raises “questions about whether the company pulled back on its ambitions after concerted pressure by the Trump campaign,” the TTP wrote. The emails don’t show that Facebook pulled back due to Trump, but TTP’s question is a fair one, and the emails raise others. If this is indeed the “largest voting information campaign in American history,” then why were the original plans scaled back? Why was Instagram, which has a younger user base perhaps more likely to vote Democrat, removed from the July 4 drive? Why wouldn’t Facebook add specific language about mail-in ballots in Illinois? This is, after all, a company that built an entire business on targeted messaging. A company spokesman denied that Facebook held back because of complaints from the Trump campaign. When someone on Twitter suggested Facebook changed its plans after a Trump complaint, a separate spokesman [tweeted]( back a picture of a woman in a tin foil hat. "We are running the largest voting information campaign in American history and are using the reach of our full platform to ensure people have reliable information about how to cast a ballot, where to vote, and why it’s essential to register," a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. "We have made no changes to this plan and any suggestion otherwise is pure fabrication by Facebook's paid critics." [The TTP]( is part of the Campaign for Accountability, a non-profit research group that investigates corporate influence in Washington. The TTP was formerly the Google Transparency Project, which published several critical studies of the internet giant. Oracle Corp., a rival of Google, [confirmed in 2016]( that was one of the funders of the project. Even if Facebook is not scaling back its voter drive, the company has sometimes seemed to bow to pressure from Trump and his allies. It has made exceptions for conservative news outlets that violate its rules, and in July a third-party auditor concluded that Facebook failed to enforce its own voter-suppression rules against posts from the President. There have also been hiccups that feed this perception: Hashtag searches for Democratic presidential challenger Joe Biden recently [returned positive hashtags]( about Trump, which Facebook blamed on a software bug. “When you take this with some of the broader themes that have come out, there are a lot of questions as to the timing of some of the decisions that were made in this voter registration drive,” says Katie Paul, director of the TTP. “These are all valid questions that are being asked.” If you read one thing [California’s Rich and Desperate Homeowners Are Buying an Unproven Wildfire Cure]( As climate change exacerbates fire risk, desperate homeowners are turning to unproven fixes to protect their property -- including a fire prevention spray that can costs tens of thousands of dollars. Sponsored Content by CrowdStrike The world’s most trusted organizations partner with [Crowdstrike]( to stop data breaches. We stop. So you can go. 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