Misinformation dropped dramatically the week after Twitter banned Trump

Online misinformation about election fraud plunged 73% after several social media sites suspended President Donald Trump and key allies last week, research firm Zignal Labs has found, underscoring the power of tech companies to limit the falsehoods poisoning public debate when they act aggressively.

The new research by the San Francisco-based analytics firm reported that conversations about election fraud dropped from 2.5 million mentions to 688,000 mentions across several social media sites in the week after Trump was banned from Twitter.

Election disinformation had been a major subject of online misinformation for months, beginning even before the Nov. 3 election, pushed heavily by Trump and his allies.

Zignal found it dropped swiftly and steeply both on Twitter itself and other platforms in the days after the Twitter ban took hold on Jan. 8.

The president and his supporters also have lost accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch, Spotify, Shopify and others. Facebook called its suspension “indefinite” but left open the possibility Trump’s account could later be restored.

The findings, from Saturday through Friday, highlight how falsehoods flow across social media sites — reinforcing and amplifying each other — and offer an early indication of how concerted actions against misinformation can make a difference.

Twitter’s ban of Trump on Jan. 8, after years in which @realDonaldTrump was a potent online megaphone, has been particularly significant in curbing his ability to push misleading claims about what state and federal officials have called a free and fair election on Nov. 3.