Two years ago, Silicon Valley’s biggest technology giants faced criticism from activists and voter suppression experts for not moving sooner to restrict former president Donald Trump’s accounts after his repeated misleading claims disputing the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
Now, a coalition of 60 consumer and civil rights groups says Meta, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube are just as ill-prepared to fight disinformation from politicians and other public figures whose public pronouncements about the 2022 midterms could undermine Americans’ faith in the electoral process or lead to violence.
The Change the Terms coalition, which includes the civil rights group Color of Change and the good-government group Common Cause is releasing on Thursday a scathing 19-page analysis of the major tech companies’ election-related policies and whether they are living up to their pledges to fight disinformation ahead of the vote.
The report argues that the tech companies’ plans to fight disinformation and connect users with credible information arrived too late and were not aggressive enough to address proliferating conspiracies about widespread voter fraud or specific attacks against election officials.
“Election misinformation and disinformation are not anecdotal or seasonal. Lies — particularly the brand of election-denialism rhetoric that rose in 2020 — have been ubiquitous online for years, and this crisis has no end in sight,” the groups write.
“To treat ‘election-related’ disinformation in particular as episodic ignores that it is present year-round and shapes beliefs and opinions that lead to harassment of election officials, and election-related hoaxes and violence.”