The swift action Twitter and Facebook took to stifle an unverified New York Post article and the crushing political pressure that forced them to reverse course illustrate a key reality: With just weeks until the U.S. election, tech giants have yet to sort out their misinformation problems.
That hasn’t just been a challenge in the U.S., moreover. Silicon Valley’s social media stalwarts have faced misinformation woes in elections all around the globe since 2016, prompting them to revamp their policies on content moderation or invent new ones, entirely, in response to emerging threats and political demands.
“It’s always an election year on Twitter — we are a global service and our decisions reflect that,” Twitter’s vice president of public policy for the Americas, Jessica Herrera-Flanigan, told POLITICO this summer. “We take the learnings from every recent election around the world and use them to improve our election integrity work.”
The New York Post incident elicited partisan howling last week, which led the companies to rethink how they handle content tied to hacked materials. Ultimately, they changed policies that had been put in place to avoid a repeat of 2016, when emails that were stolen and leaked as part of a Russian interference campaign rocked the race.
Other rules are also in flux. Earlier this month, Facebook announced a moratorium on all political advertising in the period after Election Day, despite CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s previous pledge not to make any further election-related policy changes. Google imposed a narrower, post-election ban on its advertising platforms, as well.
And this week, Twitter revamped its process for how users across the globe retweet a post, prompting them to add their own commentary or insight as a way to mitigate the mindless spread of election-related misinformation with a single click.