Facebook to pay US users to stop using its services until elections; all you need to know

In a bid to assess the impact of social media on voting across the US, Facebook Inc reportedly said that it will offer money to its users to stop using the site, along with its other service Instagram. The social media giant has been repeatedly accused of filtering out posts or simply not filtering content enough. It has been accused of moulding narratives that influence elections in any major country. 

However, Facebook has now decided to assess its role in the upcoming US elections. According to international media reports, the company has decided to ascertain the role of social media giants and their influence and therefore Facebook has decided to offer $120 to its users to deactivate their accounts at the end of September. 

As per reports, last week, Facebook’s representative Liz Bourgeois had said that the ‘users will be compensated’. She said that anyone who choose to opt-in, whether it completing surveys or deactivating FB or Instagram for a period of time, will be compensated. 

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‘Facebook and Instagram research initiative’

Under the ‘new Facebook and Instagram research initiative’, the company believes that nearly four lakh people will participate in the opt-out mechanism. In a press note, Facebook informed that participants will be poached out on the site of Instagram, with a link lingering on their profiles asking them to participate in the study. The company has vowed to pursue an ‘objective, dispassionate, empirically grounded research’ to understand the correlation between social media giants and democratic elections. 

Meanwhile, the recent new comes after Facebook said that they would stop accepting new political ads in the final week of the presidential elections campaign. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that there may not be enough time to contest new claims in the final days of elections, prompting the social media to decline new political or issue ad requests. “I generally believe the best antidote to bad speech is more speech, but in the final days of an election there may not be enough time to contest new claims,” wrote Zuckerberg in a Facebook post.

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