Facebook rolled out a new feature today that lets users endorse presidential candidates, a move that will probably bring even more acrimonious comments about this election cycle into your News Feed. Yay.
Here’s how it works: You can go onto any candidate’s Facebook page — yes, this includes third-party candidates like Jill Stein and Gary Johnson; no one is getting left out — click “Endorsements” in the left-hand column and add your own endorsement. Facebook’s Help Center has detailed instructions on how to make endorsements. You can choose to make your endorsement public to everyone who visits the candidate’s page (and surely no one will abuse this to shitpost on the page of a candidate they oppose), or you can make your endorsement only to your friends and family, if you haven’t blocked them all already for posting racist memes.
It looks like Facebook plans to make the feature more widely available to candidates in state and local elections, too — the company says the only thing you need to do to receive endorsements is change the category of your page to “Politician, Political Candidate, or Government Official.”
Facebook also added an “Issues” tab to the candidates’ pages, cribbing a feature that Google incorporated into Search earlier this year that allowed candidates to list directly in search results their positions on a variety of issues.