Image: Protocol
Did Facebook’s election labels work?

Good morning! This Thursday, Facebook's election labels might've boosted engagement, Shopify has no choice but to be a bank, Trump's blog shut down, Coinbase has a new competitor and AMC is giving free popcorn to shareholders.
(Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get Source Code every day.)
Before suspending him from the platform indefinitely, Facebook all but plastered former President Donald Trump's posts with hundreds of labels that contained accurate information about the election in a bid to counter the prolific misinformation he was spreading on the platform.
One question we've been asking since that time: Did those labels work? The left-leaning group Media Matters crunched some numbers in a new report, and its findings aren't looking good for Facebook.
Posts Facebook labeled received 2.6 times more interactions than Trump's other posts, according to the report. Media Matters analyzed interactions on all of Trump's posts between Jan. 1, 2020 and Jan. 6, 2021.
So, does that mean Facebook's election labels backfired and actually drove more people toward misinformation? Not exactly. Media Matters argues that the labels "actually amplified Trump's misinformation," but attributing causation here feels like a bit of a stretch.
But limiting the spread of misinformation wasn't the point, according to Facebook. "We developed informational labels ahead of last year's election to help people get reliable sources about the election process," Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told Protocol in a statement. "We feel confident those labels helped more people get dependable information and context about the 2020 election."
Tech companies toyed with all different kinds of approaches to slowing down misinformation during the election.
But when Facebook wants to stop a certain post — or a post from a certain person or page — from spreading, the truth is that it knows how to do that. In 2018, for example, the company tweaked its algorithm to highlight trustworthy news in the News Feed, but briefly ended up defining news as "politics, crime or tragedy," according to Wired. Facebook traffic to pretty much all other news tanked as a result.
If Facebook executives had wanted to stop Trump's posts from spreading, they could have stopped Trump's posts from spreading. Instead, they slapped information labels on his most inflammatory statements in hopes that it would be enough, until it wasn't. Then, they shut down his account entirely.
The question now is not whether the labels limited the posts' spread, but instead whether they actually swayed anyone who saw them and are an effective way to correct the record. That's a question for social science researchers. As it so happens, a team of outside academics has been studying Facebook's impact on the election since last year and is due to report on its findings this summer. Here's hoping we get some answers to that question then.
Work should be flexible enough to fit the life you choose. Gone are the days of fitting your life around your work, basing every decision on how to make yourself more available for the grind. Trello gives you and your team the freedom you need to actually get things done.
Nvidia's Jensen Huang said he's still confident the Arm acquisition will eventually be approved:
On Protocol | Fintech: Shopify doesn't really want to be a bank, Kaz Nejatian said, but it found that too many merchants couldn't get help otherwise:
On Protocol | Policy: Rep. Zoe Lofgren introduced the EAGLE Act to allow more green cards to go to workers from India and elsewhere:
Alex Russell is leaving Google. He was one of Google's most staunch believers in the open web, and as for his next step, he said only that he's heading out on a long road trip.
Enjoy hired two new C-suite execs: Tiffany Meriweather as Enjoy's new chief legal officer, and Ettienne Brandt as chief commercial officer.
Jackson Williams is the new creator partnerships lead at Stir. He joins from Instagram.
Sean Mills is leaving Snap in September. Vanessa Guthrie will be the company's new head of original content.
Apple is bleeding car talent. It has lost "multiple top managers" on the self-driving car team, Bloomberg reported, including Dave Scott and Jaime Waydo. Still, the team is hundreds strong, and Doug Field remains in charge.
Prosus bought Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion. (Prosus also happens to be the largest shareholder in Tencent.)
Symphony bought FireEye for $1.2 billion, and Mandiant Solutions will now be its own company separate from FireEye.
LinkedIn is going to start paying the leaders of its employee resource groups, Chief People Officer Teuila Hanson said, because it's work and should be compensated. "Historically," she told Axios, "these employees take on leadership roles and the associated work in addition to their day jobs, putting in extra time, energy, and insight. And despite the tremendous value, visibility and impact to the organization, this work is rarely rewarded financially."
This is both extremely logical — the people who run these internal groups do an enormous amount of work, and are increasingly valuable to companies trying to build a more diverse and equitable workplace — and a growing trend. Justworks's Michael Baptiste explained his company's thinking to us last year, and Twitter and others are following suit. These groups are important, they do hard work, and the industry is smart to recognize that.
Get out of your inbox and start doing actual work. Trello makes it easy to collaborate with teammates, organize tasks, and understand what's due now, and what's up next. Stop digging through long email chains with no idea where to find the information you need. Say hello to Trello.
Are you tired of explaining the tech news of the day to your co-workers every morning? Let us do the heavy lifting and refer them to Source Code.
Send them your referral link via Slack, text, email, or carrier pigeon and we'll send you your very own Protocol mug after you refer five friends!
Your referral link:*|RH_REFLINK|*
Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to sourcecode@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day; see you tomorrow.
Correction: An earlier version of this story said that Facebook would limit the reach of user posts that repeatedly spread information. We meant misinformation. This story was updated on June 3, 2021.
To give you the best possible experience, this site uses cookies. If you continue browsing. you accept our use of cookies. You can review our privacy policy to find out more about the cookies we use.