{"id":255465,"date":"2023-06-15T01:47:00","date_gmt":"2023-06-15T01:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mathewingram.blog\/?p=255465"},"modified":"2024-01-04T18:26:52","modified_gmt":"2024-01-04T18:26:52","slug":"the-tech-platforms-have-surrendered-in-the-fight-over-election-related-misinformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2023\/06\/15\/the-tech-platforms-have-surrendered-in-the-fight-over-election-related-misinformation\/","title":{"rendered":"The tech platforms have surrendered in the fight over election-related misinformation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Last week YouTube<\/strong> announced that it will no longer<\/a> remove videos that say the presidential election in 2020 was fraudulent, stolen, or otherwise illegitimate. The Google-owned video platform wrote in a blog post that it keeps two goals in mind when it develops policies around content, one of which is to protect users, and the other to provide \u201ca home for open discussion and debate.\u201d Finding a balance<\/a> between the two is difficult when political speech is involved, YouTube added, and in the end, the company decided that \u201cthe ability to openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions, is core to a functioning democratic society.\u201d While removing<\/a> election-denying content might curb some misinformation, the company said, it could also \u201ccurtail political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of real-world harm.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

YouTube didn\u2019t say in its blog post, or in any of<\/a> its other public comments about the change, why it chose to make such a policy decision now, especially when the US is heading into another presidential election in which Donald Trump, the man who almost single-handedly made such<\/a> policies necessary, is a candidate. All the company would say is that it \u201ccarefully deliberated\u201d about the change. It\u2019s not the only platform to decide that the misinformation guardrails it erected after the Capitol riots in 2021 are no longer required. Twitter and Meta, Facebook\u2019s parent company, dismantled most of their restrictions related to election denial some time ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Twitter announced in January of 2022 that\u00a0it would no longer take action<\/a>\u00a0against false claims about the legitimacy of the election. At the time, a spokesperson told CNN that Twitter had not been enforcing its \u201ccivic integrity misleading information\u201d policy, under which users could be suspended or even banned for such claims, since March of 2021. The spokesperson said\u00a0the policy<\/a>\u00a0was no longer being applied to election denial because it was intended to be used during an election or campaign, and Joe Biden had already been president for over a year at that point. Twitter added that it was still enforcing its rules related to misleading information about \u201cwhen, where, or how to participate in a civic process.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This was originally published as<\/a> the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Since Elon Musk took control of Twitter in April of 2022, he has made a number of statements about election-related disinformation, in some cases sharing links containing<\/a> dubious claims (prominent election deniers<\/a> have also had their accounts restored). Last month, however, he assured a CNBC reporter that tweets containing false claims about the 2020 election being stolen \u201cwould be corrected.\u201d According to some reports, that doesn\u2019t appear to be happening. The same week Musk made his promise, the Associated Press noted that<\/a> \u201cTwitter posts that amplified those false claims have thousands of shares with no visible enforcement.\u201d The most widely shared included false claims from Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose account was suspended after she shared misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic<\/a>. Her account was reinstated by Musk last November.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In January, Meta announced that it would reinstate Trump\u2019s Facebook and Instagram accounts, arguing that<\/a> \u201cthe risk to [public safety] has sufficiently receded.\u201d Trump\u2019s team has been posting to Facebook regularly<\/a> since then, including claims that an investigation into his possession of classified documents is \u201ca continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time.\u201d Twitter reinstated Trump\u2019s account last November, something Musk had promised<\/a> to do even before he acquired the company, but Trump has not posted anything since. That could be a result of an agreement to post primarily on Truth Social<\/a>, the Twitter alternative he cofounded. That deal expires this month, and Trump has suggested that he may move back to Twitter, which was a crucial part of his 2016 campaign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other politicians have also been given a get-out-of-suspension-free card by the platforms. Earlier this month, Instagram\u2014which is owned by Meta\u2014reinstated an account belonging to<\/a> Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine lobbyist. The account was suspended in February of 2021 for sharing misinformation about COVID-19<\/a>, including claims about the alleged harmfulness of the vaccines against it. In 2022, the Instagram and Facebook accounts belonging to Kennedy\u2019s nonprofit Children\u2019s Health Defense organization were removed<\/a> for spreading medical misinformation (both remain suspended as of the publication of this article). Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, said in a statement to the Washington Post<\/em> that Kennedy\u2019s account was restored because<\/a> \u201che is now an active candidate for president.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Meta announced its decision to reinstate Trump\u2019s account, the move was widely criticized for ignoring the potential risks to democracy. Democratic congressman Adam Schiff said in a tweet that<\/a> restoring Trump\u2019s ability \u201cto spread his lies and demagoguery\u201d was dangerous, since he had shown \u201cno remorse\u201d for his actions related to the January 6 riots. David Graham wrote in The Atlantic<\/em> that Meta\u2019s statement about the danger having receded was disingenuous<\/a>. The 2020 election might be in the past, he said, but \u201cone reason it can\u2019t be relegated to history is that Trump continues to surface it\u2014and the direct harms continue.\u201d The arrest of Solomon Pe\u00f1a, a failed Republican candidate and Trump supporter, for shootings<\/a> in New Mexico \u201cshows how Trump\u2019s election denial reverberates,\u201d Graham wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the case of YouTube\u2019s policy change, Imran Ahmed, chief executive officer of the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, told The Guardian<\/em> this week<\/a> that the move is \u201cfundamentally dangerous.\u201d American democracy \u201ccannot survive wave after wave of disinformation that seeks to undermine democracy, consensus and further polarizes the public,\u201d he said. Critics argue that election disinformation can be especially dangerous on YouTube, since the service\u2019s recommendation<\/a> algorithms tend to suggest related videos, and this can compound the problem. One study found that users who were already skeptical of election results were shown three times as many<\/a> election denial videos as those who were not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Others have defended the moves by the platforms. Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement that<\/a> social media companies \u201care central actors when it comes to our collective ability to speak\u2014and hear the speech of others\u2014online\u201d and therefore they should \u201cerr on the side of allowing a wide range of political speech, even when it offends.\u201d Similar defenses have been put forward in the case of YouTube\u2019s policy reversal on election denial. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and founder of FactCheck.org, argues that fact-checking<\/a> is better than blocking speech, and a number of researchers say that the influence of disinformation or \u201cfake news\u201d on the 2016 election and politics in general has been overstated<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Casey Newton argued in his Platformer<\/em> newsletter that while other media outlets such as Fox News have also given credence to or platformed election denial claims, social media can accelerate those claims<\/a> in ways that traditional media cannot. \u201cIt\u2019s one thing to host a single ill-considered town hall, and another to volunteer to serve in perpetuity as a digital library for all the election lies that candidates and their surrogates see fit to upload,\u201d Newton wrote<\/a>. After January 6, the platforms all took steps to join the battle against election misinformation and in favor of fact-based news, he said, and then \u201cone by one, platforms got tired of fighting it\u201d and simply gave up. Whether Trump and other candidates take advantage of that defensive gap\u2014and how they do so\u2014remains to be seen.<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week YouTube announced that it will no longer remove videos that say the presidential election in 2020 was fraudulent, stolen, or otherwise illegitimate. The Google-owned video platform wrote in a blog post that it keeps two goals in mind when it develops policies around content, one of which is to protect users, and the other to … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The tech platforms have surrendered in the fight over election-related misinformation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-255465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newsletters"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255465"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258032,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255465\/revisions\/258032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}