Silicon Valley is getting nervous. With less than three weeks to go before the US Presidential election, the likes of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are on high alert for political disinformation.
President’s Trump’s baseless allegation on social media that voting by mail causes fraud is just one example. But the tech giants also have to deal with a tangled mess of foreign and domestic actors creating disinformation campaigns.
Last month, federal authorities warned such campaigns would try to spread false information about the election, including questioning any results not released on November 3, by creating fake websites and altering existing sites on social media.
The goal would be to undermine the election, leading to chaos — and possibly violence — when the results are released.
Already under pressure from US antitrust investigations, the last thing tech giants need is to be blamed for a chaotic outcome to a dirty election.
Facebook faces particular scrutiny. The company’s proven ability to change user behaviour has sparked concerns the platform could be used to also suppress voter turnout or change voting intentions as the election creeps closer. It recently boasted how its voter registration campaign has helped 2.5 million people register to vote this year.
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That may be why the platform has announced a series of headline-grabbing policy changes in order to appear proactive.
This week alone, it banned pages and groups linked to the pro-Trump conspiracy group QAnon. On Wednesday, it said all political and issue-based advertising would be banned indefinitely once the polls closed. The company also said it would remove posts that used “militarised language”, calling for people to monitor voting sites.
But for many, these policies are too little too late. "[Facebook is] a much more powerful platform [than other social media sites] for campaigners because they can use the Facebook advertising tools to reach out beyond their own list of voters to find voters," says Martin Moore, author of Democracy Hacked: How Technology is Destabilising Global Politics.
"Yet Facebook is doing less than both Google and Twitter when it comes to restricting the way in which campaigners can use his platform after the election."
Twitter announced it would ban political advertising in October last year while Google — whose parent company Alphabet also owns YouTube — cracked down a month later, ruling political advertisers could target voters based on their political affiliation.
This week Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of site integrity, told Reuters that the company is exploring changes to the small blue notices that it attaches to misleading tweets, to make these signals more ‘overt’ and be more ‘direct’ in giving users information.
There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020
Not everyone is convinced such labels work. "Mostly things take off so fast that if you wait 20 or 30 minutes… most of the spread for someone with a big audience has already happened," says Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington who has been studying Twitter’s labeling responses.
She claims it took Twitter about eight hours to add labels to Trump tweets about mail-in voting in May. Two Trump tweets in September appeared to have been labeled within two hours.
Jonathan Bright, senior research fellow at Oxford University’s Internet Institute, believes one way social media companies could moderate political speech is by focusing on the websites people share to justify their false claims, adding these are more of a problem than individual posts.
"I think the biggest challenges for these platforms is really that they’ve grown so large and the scale of their users is just so big, that it’s nearly impossible for them to consistently moderate content at this point," adds Jillian York, director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
It is hardly controversial to censor disinformation attempts by groups backed by Russia, for example, but moderating political speech is a much thornier issue when the people behind the posts are Americans.
In July, Republicans used the antitrust hearing as a platform to air their grievances connected to political bias. “I will just cut to the chase. Big tech is out to get conservatives. That’s not a suspicion, that’s not a hunch, that’s a fact,” said US Representative Jim Jordan, referencing YouTube’s decision to "censor" posts that conflict with recommendations from the World Health Organisation.
The way Republicans used an antitrust hearing to rant about political bias on social media sent a clear message: We’re more likely to tolerate Big Tech if they tolerate us. That is likely to weigh on the mind of social media moguls who are coming under increasing pressure to define what is "true" and what is "false."
Policing political speech this way is new territory; there is no handbook. But the stakes are high for the tech giants, and in matter of weeks, it will become clear just how far they are willing to go to protect US democracy.
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