Three years ago, major internet platforms including Meta, Twitter and YouTube responded to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riots with decisive action — suspending thousands of accounts that had spread election lies and removing posts glorifying the attack on US democracy.Their efforts weren’t perfect, certainly; groups promoting baseless allegations of election fraud hid in plain sight even after some platforms announced a crackdown.
But since 2021, the social media industry has undergone a dramatic transformation and pivoted from many of the commitments, policies and tools it once embraced to help safeguard the peaceful transfer of democratic power.
The public got a taste of the new normal this summer, when social media was flooded with misinformation following the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump and the platforms said nothing.
Though platforms still maintain pages describing what election safeguards they do support, such as specific bans on content suppressing the vote or promoting violence near polling places, many who have worked with those companies to contain misinformation in the past report an overall decline in their engagement with the issue.
“The last few years have been challenging for the knowledge community working with platforms,” said Baybars Orsek, managing director at the fact-checking organization Logically Facts. “The impact of layoffs, budget cuts in journalism programs, and the crackdown on trust and safety teams at X (formerly Twitter) and other major platforms have set troubling precedents as we approach the upcoming elections.”
The shift took place against the backdrop of a yearslong intimidation campaign led by Republican attorneys general and state and federal lawmakers aimed at forcing social media companies to platform falsehoods and hate speech and thwarting those working to study or limit the spread of that destabilizing content.
Those efforts coincided with the rise of a vocal cadre of elite Silicon Valley reactionaries, an increasingly ideological group that bristles at notions of corporate social responsibility. The people involved are among the world’s wealthiest and most influential, with the power to shape the products and services used by billions. And they are growing more politically assertive — warning government leaders to back off or face millions of dollars in campaign contributions to their opponents and laying down political manifestos that serve as litmus tests for startup founders who need funding….
ech companies have made it far more difficult for outsiders to monitor the platforms, creating blind spots in which false, viral claims can thrive.
Last year, X announced it would begin charging steep fees for access to its firehose of posts and other data. The change immediately triggered concerns that transit agencies and the National Weather Service would have to stop posting real-time updates that millions depend on. Musk quickly gave those organizations an exemption, but the paywall has affected civil society groups and academics who need large volumes of posts to study how false claims traverse networks.
Misinformation researchers decried the ”outrageously expensive” fees for accessing Twitter’s firehose, but the complaints went nowhere. Prior to Musk, Twitter’s data was given to researchers for free or at minimal cost. After the change, they were asked to pony up as much as $2.5 million a year for less data than was available before — a significant new barrier to transparency and accountability.
X has touted its crowdsourced fact-checking feature, Community Notes, as a solution to counter misinformation, but independent analysts have widely criticized the tool as slow and inconsistently applied.
In a similar move, Meta shut down CrowdTangle, a monitoring platform for Facebook and Instagram that it once promoted to election officials in all 50 states “to help them quickly identify misinformation, voter interference and suppression.”
CrowdTangle’s data had shown that right-wing content performs exceptionally well on Meta’s platforms, contrary to conservative allegations. Though the company said a successor tool would be even better, research published by the Columbia Journalism Review found the replacement had fewer features and was less accessible….