San Francisco (AFP)

Facebook has set itself the goal of helping put four million more Americans on the electoral roll for the November presidential election, and has confirmed that it will block all foreign media advertising during this period. .

"We are announcing the largest electoral information campaign in American history on Wednesday. Our goal is to help four million people register," social network founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a column for USA Today. .

While voter registration is a key issue for presidential elections in the United States, members of certain disadvantaged communities having difficulty or reluctance to be on the lists, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he wanted to offer its users a "new Center for 'electoral information [...] at the top of the news feed on Facebook and Instagram, to make sure everyone has the opportunity to see it. "

"Overall, we expect that more than 160 million people in the United States will see information from reliable sources on Facebook on the procedure for voting in general elections between July and November."

The network "also introduces the possibility of no longer seeing political advertisements", a feature that will be launched from June 24.

Its head of public affairs, Nick Clegg has also confirmed that the group, accused of having turned a blind eye to foreign interference during the 2016 presidential campaign, intended to block all advertisements "from media organizations controlled by the State in other countries ", in a column in the British newspaper Daily Telegraph.

Facebook had announced on June 4 its intention to ban from this summer advertisements posted by media controlled financially and editorial by a state on its American platforms.

On Wednesday, Mr Zuckerberg put forward his determination against disinformation.

"In 2016, we were slow to identify foreign interference on our platform," he admitted. "The threat of electoral interference is real and still current, but our systems are more prepared than ever. We dismantled more than 50 fake account networks in 2019, and we removed 18 this year."

According to Nick Clegg, between March and May, Facebook already prevented "more than 750,000 political advertisements targeting the United States from being broadcast because the advertiser had not completed the authorization process".

He said the group now had more than 35,000 people working on safety and security issues, three times more than four years ago.

Strongly criticized for its decision not to moderate the controversial and inaccurate publications of the American president Donald Trump, whereas at the end of May Twitter had decided to mask a message of Donald Trump for violation of the rules of the network on the "apology of violence", Mark Zuckerberg again defended the guidelines of his network in USA Today.

"Accountability only works if we can see what those who are seeking our votes say, even if we really don't like what they say," he wrote.

© 2020 AFP