During the chaos after the 2020 election, tech companies erected unprecedented defenses to prevent misinformation from spreading on their platforms.
Twitter’s Trust and Safety team added fact-checking labels to false claims about the election and blocked some of then-President Donald Trump’s posts about vote fraudfrom spreading. Facebook peppered election posts with links to its voter information center, which was filled with reliable information about the legitimacy of mail-in ballots and voting in general. Several weeks after the race was called, YouTube began removing videos that made claims of widespread election fraud.
Four years later, all those platforms are in retreat.
Under Elon Musk, Twitter — now X — eliminated most of its content moderation staff, replacing them with a crowdsourced, and flawed, fact-checking experiment. Facebook, now Meta, has scaled down its voter information center, and has decreased the visibility of posts about politics across Facebook and Instagram.And YouTube now allows claims of election fraud on the network.
Facing legal threats and political pressure, programs to combat the spread of disinformation have waned at social media giants; most companies have declined to update their policies to respond to the 2024 election. A once-thriving ecosystem of academic and government programs intended to monitor the spread of hoaxes and foreign interference online also has diminished, opening the door for threats against election workers and viral, unproven claims about voting irregularities.
This new environment has fostered a flood of exaggerated claims about irregularities in the voting process, which researchers say has escalated as Election Day approaches.Some election officials and researchers argue this ecosystem exposes voters to an information free-for-all, warping their perception of the results and potentially contributing to political instability….
The corporate retreat is fueled by several factors. A conservative legal and political campaign over allegations of censorship has successfully pressured government agencies, tech companies and outside researchers to stop working together to detect election falsehoods.Musk, who has dramatically reduced X’s misinformation programs, has inspired other companies to roll back safeguards against propaganda.
Some platforms aren’t just allowing false claims of election fraud to spread, they are actively soliciting them. X owner Elon Musk’s pro-Trump super PAC, America PAC, last month launched an Election Integrity community page on X to encourage more than 58,000 members to post examples of potential voter fraud in the 2024 election, creating a database that includes many unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations….