Was social media able to counter election misinformation?
Ahead of the election, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube promised to clamp down on election misinformation, including unsubstantiated charges of fraud and premature declarations of victory by candidates. And they mostly did just that — though not without a few hiccups.
But overall their measures still didn’t really address the problems exposed by the 2020 U. S. presidential contest, critics of the social platforms contend.
“We’re seeing exactly what we expected, which is not enough, especially in the case of Facebook,” said Shannon McGregor, an assistant professor of journalism and media at the University of North Carolina.
One big test emerged early Wednesday morning as vote-counting continued in battleground states including Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. President Donald Trump made a White House appearance before cheering supporters, declaring he would challenge the poll results. He also posted misleading statements about the election on Facebook and Twitter, following months of signaling his unfounded doubts about expanded mail-in voting and his desire for final election results when polls closed on Nov. 3.
So what did tech companies do about it? For the most part, what they said they would, which primarily meant labeling false or misleading election posts in order to point users to reliable information. In Twitter’s case, that sometimes meant obscuring the offending posts, forcing readers to click through warnings to see them and limiting the ability to share them.
The video-sharing app TikTok, popular with young people, said it pulled down some videos Wednesday from high-profile accounts making election fraud allegations, saying they violated the app’s policies on misleading information. For Facebook and YouTube, it mostly meant attaching authoritative information to election-related posts.
For instance, Google-owned YouTube showed video of Trump’s White House remarks suggesting fraud and premature victories, just as some traditional news channels did. But Google placed an “information panel” beneath the videos noting that election results may not be final and linking to Google’s election results page with additional information.
“They’re just appending this little label to the president’s posts, but they’re appending those to any politician talking about the election,” said McGregor, who blamed both the tech giants and traditional media outlets for shirking their responsibility to curb the spread of misinformation about the election results instead of amplifying a falsehood just because the president said it.
“Allowing any false claim to spread can lead more people to accept it once it’s there,” she said.
Trump wasn’t alone in attracting such labels. Republican U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis got a label on Twitter for declaring a premature re-election victory in North Carolina. The same thing happened to a Democratic official claiming former Vice President Joe Biden had won Wisconsin.
The flurry of Trump claims that began early Wednesday morning continued after the sun rose over Washington. By late morning, Trump was tweeting an unfounded complaint that his early lead in some states seemed to “magically disappear” as the night went on and more ballots were counted.
Twitter quickly slapped that with a warning that said “some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.” It was among at least three such warnings Twitter applied to Trump tweets Wednesday, which make it harder for viewers to see the posts without first reading the warning; it did the same on a post from another individual that Trump sought to amplify.
Much of the slowdown in the tabulation of results had been widely forecasted for months, because the coronavirus pandemic led many states to make it easier to vote by mail, and millions chose to do so rather than venturing out to cast ballots in person. Mail ballots can take longer to process than ballots cast at polling places.
In a Sept. 3 post, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that if a candidate or campaign tries to declare victory before the results are in, the social network would label their post to note that official results are not yet in and directing people to the official results.
But Facebook limited that policy to official candidates and campaign declaring premature victory in the overall election. Posts that declared premature victory in specific states were flagged with a general notification about where to find election information but not warnings that the information was false or misleading.