YouTube has since de-monetized the video, but it remains live with more than 427K views. Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter will be under increased pressure to control election-related misinformation, which the social media giants have historically struggled to police. Politicians, political campaigns, foreign actors, and even average users have long used the services to disseminate false claims about candidates, and, in some cases, undermine the credibility of this year’s election given its unique circumstances. The president’s social media posts throughout the evening and into Wednesday posed a challenge for Facebook and Twitter, as some of them contained premature claims of victory — both in individual states and the election overall — and allegations of election fraud, made without evidence.
Twitter has highlighted its use of “prebunking,” the process of educating people about disinformation tactics, as an effective way of reducing the spread of misinformation. Social media companies have announced plans to deal with misinformation in the 2022 midterm elections, but the companies vary in their approaches and effectiveness. We asked experts on social media to grade how ready Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube are to handle the task. As we judge how social media handled the 2020 presidential election, though, we need a standard for success as well as failure. Election Day is here, and in the next few days or weeks, we’ll know who won — but for lots of people, tonight isn’t just about choosing the next president. It’s also a stress test for online platforms and a measure of how carefully they can handle information when the stakes are this high.
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Means I still have a soft spot for tech policy; Congressional hearings can sometimes be as entertaining as a Bravo reality show, for better or worse. But PCMag is all about the technology we use every day, as well as keeping an eye out for the trends that will shape the industry in the years ahead (or flop on arrival). I’ve covered the rise of social media, the iOS vs. Android wars, the cord-cutting revolution that’s now left us with hefty streaming bills, and the effort to stuff artificial intelligence into every product you could imagine. This job has taken me to CES in Vegas (one too many times), IFA in Berlin, and MWC in Barcelona. I also drove a Tesla 1,000 miles out west as part of our Best Mobile Networks project. Of late, my focus is on our hard-working team of reporters at PCMag, guiding and editing their robust coverage of satellite internet efforts, electric vehicles, the latest cyberattacks, AI, and more.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization dedicated to unlocking the knowledge of experts for the public good, under a Creative Commons license. While Twitter has generally not been treated as the biggest culprit of misinformation since 2016, it is unclear if its misinformation measures are sufficient. In fact, shares of misinformation on Twitter increased from about 3 million per month during the 2016 presidential election to about 5 million per month in July 2018.
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There are countless ways that the internet could make tonight’s election worse, and only a few ways to make it better. For The National Journal, where my beat included state-level tech news and all the congressional hearings and FCC meetings how twitter and facebook think they handled the election I could handle. It also added a label on that bizarre Trump tweet in which he “claimed” wins for “Electoral Vote purposes” in various states despite the fact that votes were still being counted.
- And he challenged both firms to disclose how many times they had blocked Republican and Democratic candidates for office in the 2016, 2018 and 2020 elections to reveal any discrepancy.
- “There’s Republican and Democrat concern about the power that’s being used by social media outlets to tell us what we can see and what we can’t, what’s true and what’s not,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the committee chairman.
- The CEOs of Twitter and Facebook have stood by their handling of misinformation before and during the US presidential election.
- Twitter also permanently banned Bannon from the platform for “glorifying violence.”
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Roth mentioned a few, from a high-profile hack like Twitter saw in July to attempts by Russia and other countries to use the platform to spread misinformation. In the interim, Facebook is limiting the ability to find content with controversial hashtags, like #rigged or #sharpiegate. If you search for those terms, you’ll get a prompt that asks you to visit Facebook’s Voting Information Center.
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“No you’re not. You’re putting up a page that says ‘voter fraud of any kind is exceedingly rare in the United States’. That’s not linking to a broader conversation. That’s taking a disputed policy position.” The Republican Senator Ted Cruz took a different tack, asking why Twitter was “putting purported warnings on virtually any statement about voter fraud”. She noted that hashtags for Steal The Vote and Voter Fraud had garnered more than 300,000 interactions on Facebook’s platforms in the hours after Mr Trump falsely declared victory. Democrats questioned whether steps taken to flag that President Trump’s claims of election fraud were “disputed” had gone far enough. Several Democrats grilled Zuckerberg on Facebook’s decision not to ban former White House advisor Steve Bannon after he called in a live-streamed video for the beheadings of Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI director Christopher Wray.
Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Though it has taken some steps toward transparency, as seen in its Ad Library, it has a long way to go to win back consumer confidence and uphold its social responsibility. Overall, I believe that none of the platforms have addressed these issues very effectively.
This, the politician claimed, was used to track people’s use of the wider internet as well as to monitor them logging into different Facebook accounts even if registered with different names. When senators last grilled Dorsey and Zuckerberg, the politicians were in full campaigning mode and it was a bit of a mess. Both of the chief executives said this would be hard to do, but they suggested one consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic was they would have more people working from home in the long-term, which in turn should entail greater diversity among their workforce. “I think that we really went quite far in terms of helping to distribute reliable and accurate information about the results.” “I believe we have taken some very significant steps in this area,” Mr Zuckerberg responded, pointing to information it had placed at the top of the screens of US-based Facebook and Instagram users. Senator Feinstein went on to ask Mr Zuckerberg if he felt enough had been done to prevent people delegitimising the election’s result.
- If you’re looking for an information firehose, Reddit’s r/news moderators have laid out a plan for stopping false stories on the forum, including answers to some of the election’s most contentious questions.
- Twitter users are also now prompted when they are about to amplify misinformation before they are able retweet a flagged tweet.
- Sometimes you want to share the nail-biting experience of seeing polls close and results roll in.
- But in the heat of this election season, every decision is subject to intense scrutiny — and last-minute policy changes and judgment calls have led to outcries from both sides of the aisle.
- Facebook posts falsely asserting that thousands of dead Pennsylvanians were voting reached up to 11.3 million people, and Spanish-language disinformation may have played a substantial role in Florida results.
Many of the threats to American democracy have stemmed from internal divisions fed by inequality, injustice and racism. These fissures have been, from time to time, purposefully widened and deepened by foreign nations wishing to distract and destabilize the U.S. government. The advent of cyberspace has put the disinformation process into overdrive, both speeding the viral spread of stories across national boundaries and platforms and causing a proliferation in the types of traditional and social media willing to run with fake stories. Some social media networks have proved more able than others at meeting the moment. Observers have faulted YouTube for not doing enough internationally to address election-related misinformation.
What we can tell so far is that although they were far more assertive than ever in addressing disinformation, the sludge still dominated the debate. Between Nov. 4 and Nov. 6, nine of the top 10 Facebook posts (all by Donald Trump and evangelist Franklin Graham) bore warning labels for misinformation. Twitter’s actions to limit the sharing of misinformation by prominent accounts did seem to have slowed the circulation of misinformation, according to the Election Integrity Partnership. Certainly, none of the top Twitter posts from the same time period has a warning label.
Twitter did a better job than Facebook at reining in Trump’s false election posts, misinformation experts say
Facebook plans to proactively notify users when the election results become available. YouTube is taking steps to try to mitigate election misinformation and promote news from credible organizations. “I’ve been fairly impressed with Twitter’s follow-through,” said Lisa Fazio, assistant professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University. She said that although Facebook’s information labels tend to be more detailed than Twitter’s, the fact it places no sharing restrictions means “false information can still quickly spread on the platform.” Any tweets from Trump that violate the company’s election integrity policy cannot be liked, retweeted, or replied to — although people are allowed to “quote” retweet, i.e. they can retweet it so long as they add their own comment. “Per our updated Civic Integrity Policy, people on Twitter, including candidates for office, may not claim an election win before it is authoritatively called,” a Twitter spokesperson said in an email.
The social platforms’ actions against the New York Post article takes things a step further by limiting the spread of a news article from a major publication. Though both social networks have bans against posting hacked content, coverage of leaked material is allowed. If we look at the circulation of content from information laundering sites, the conclusion is the same. High-credibility outlets had slightly lower interactions per article during election week, with a 6 percent drop.
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False-content outlets saw a 68 percent jump in shares (original posts or retweets) per article from verified accounts. For YouTube, both false-content and high-credibility outlets increased their likes per video, but false-content outlets increased theirs by 98 percent, while high-credibility ones increased theirs by 16 percent. Just this week, former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign called Facebook “the nation’s foremost propagator of disinformation about the voting process” because of its decision to label, rather than remove, Trump’s posts attacking mail-in ballots.
In Brazil, for example, sharing YouTube videos on the messaging app Telegram has become a popular way to spread misinformation related to elections. This suggests that YouTube may be vulnerable to organized election-related disinformation in the U.S. as well. Some recent research suggests misinformation is often driven by traditional media, politicians, and other “elite” actors. Trump, among other things, massively amplifies conspiracy theories by retweeting small accounts that espouse them. During election night, plenty of accounts will probably post false and potentially rule-breaking claims.