Social media: Another election filled with disinformation
Despite the lessons of 2016, social media platforms still “had their hands full” trying to curb misinformation amid another tight election, said Andrew Morse in CNET .com. Twitter appended warning labels to President Trump’s tweets about “alleged misconduct in the vote count.” Facebook took the extraordinary step of shutting down a “massive group called ‘Stop the Steal’ that was spreading false claims” and had amassed 340,000 followers in a matter of hours. YouTube also “took down multiple videos livestreaming fake election results hours before polls closed anywhere,” including one from a channel with 1.5 million subscribers. And still, Election Day turned into a full week of conspiracy theories and baseless claims, with lies spreading faster than Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube could control them.
Trump is clearly social media’s biggest headache, said Steven
Levy in Wired.com. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey decided years ago “that the newsworthiness of presidential speech allowed Trump to say hateful things that violate policy.” They tried to deal with this by including warnings, which left nobody happy. Unfortunately, Trump will still be newsworthy when he is no longer president, and social media will be stuck with the same problem. After 2016’s debacle, social media companies had years to “figure out how to build truth into their business,” said Geoffrey Fowler in The Washington Post. Instead, they just made up a bunch of rules in the past few months “to escape that day’s negative news cycle.” Real change starts with fixing their engagementbased business models and “reducing the audience for liars.”
Actually, modifying their viral business models was exactly what social media companies did, said Kevin Roose in The New York Times. “For months, nearly every step these companies have taken to safeguard the election has involved slowing down, shutting off, or otherwise hampering core parts of their products”— all in the interest of saving democracy. Facebook put in “virality circuit breakers” to aid its fact-checkers. Twitter disabled sharing on misleading tweets. Even YouTube “started promoting ‘authoritative sources’ to prevent cranks and conspiracy theorists from filling up search results.” Changes in Facebook’s News Feed have made it “no longer hospitable to Macedonian teens looking to turn a quick profit” by sowing American chaos, said Casey Newton in TheVerge.com. But while the platforms largely fixed 2016’s problems, 2020 didn’t look hugely different. Now most of the misinformation and discord is “homegrown,” even coming from the president himself, “supported by a network of enablers.”