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Social Media Braces for a Deluge of Voter Misinformation

Social Media Braces for a Deluge of Voter Misinformation

Three days before the Nov. 6, 2018, midterm elections, conservative pundit Ann Coulter sent a tweet to her 2.1 million followers. “CONSERVATIVES! Remember to vote Nov 6!” she wrote. “Liberals: Your polling day is Nov 7.”

The tweet was no joke, at least not to Twitter Inc., which removed it for violating its policy against spreading voting misinformation. But the damage was done: A call from a verified, prominent American citizen to keep Democrats from the polls circulated for hours before Twitter was able to stop it. That’s just one example of voter suppression efforts that civic groups worry will flood social media sites before the Nov. 3 presidential election and decrease enthusiasm, which could already be dampened by pandemic fears and racial tensions.

Social Media Braces for a Deluge of Voter Misinformation

Tech giants Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet’s YouTube have been ramping up efforts to fight misinformation on where, when, and how to vote. Twitter bars election intimidation tweets, such as attempting to scare voters into thinking the police are monitoring polling sites. On July 21, Twitter said it would take more aggressive action against accounts linked to QAnon, a far-right conspiracy group that’s tried to influence elections in the past.

Facebook Inc. is building a special landing page with election information that it will attach to vote-related posts. Google has similar policies for its ads and YouTube content. But civil rights groups and election experts say tech companies aren’t keeping up with the increasingly sophisticated ways that voter suppression messages flourish.

Social Media Braces for a Deluge of Voter Misinformation

Political operatives and pundits like Coulter, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, have also learned that persuading people to stay home on Election Day is easier than trying to change minds about which candidate to back. “If you can shift just a few of those people in the states that matter” to sit out, then it could help a candidate carry a state, says Sandra Matz, an associate business professor at Columbia University who’s studied ad targeting.

The pressure on social media companies to act is growing: In some states, voter registration deadlines are 10 weeks away. Absentee and mail-in ballots will start arriving in mailboxes even earlier in swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

Tech companies “have to be able to get this right in the next several weeks,” says Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights. “The misinformation efforts are only going to get intensified and the platforms’ inaction on these issues is going to be increasingly problematic and increasingly harmful the closer we get to the election.”

Civic groups are also gearing up to fight back. Election Protection, a coalition of more than 100 advocacy groups, nonprofits, and government entities, is hosting hotlines for voters, publicizing election information, notifying officials and tech companies about misinformation, and monitoring Election Day mishaps.

Long before the internet became an essential campaign tool, political operatives pushed out deceptive messages about voting. They might have sent mailers with the wrong election date to homes in neighborhoods where their opponent was strong, says Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “It’s just a flat-out dirty trick,” Kamarck says. “It used to happen all the time pre-internet,” but now it’s cheaper to do it online.

Social Media Braces for a Deluge of Voter Misinformation

Social media giants learned a lot about how digital voter suppression works in 2016, when Russia ran a massive campaign to influence the election in Donald Trump’s favor, according to the 2018 indictment of Russian nationals by special counsel Robert Mueller. Tech companies say they’re determined not to let foreign agents meddle again.

Civic organizations aren’t sanguine—and say it’s just as likely that homegrown agitators, including Trump, could try to lead voters astray this time. An independent civil rights audit released on July 8 criticized Facebook for being “far too reluctant” to adopt strong voter suppression standards, including failing to take action against the president’s false posts that California, Michigan, and Nevada were mailing ballots illegally. The audit concluded that Trump’s posts were wrong. Facebook said the president didn’t violate its rules.

Facebook has since started to label all posts that include voting information with a message that says “get official voting info” and a link to a government website. It added such a label to a July 21 Trump post saying mail-in ballots would lead to a “CORRUPT ELECTION” and to a Joe Biden post that said the election was “just over 100 days” away.

The social media giants are also in the awkward position of having to police content posted by elected officials who have the power to regulate them. Twitter and Facebook have similar anti-voter-suppression policies, yet have diverged in how they enforce them, with Twitter acting more aggressively. Facebook faces antitrust investigations at state and federal levels and has more to lose than Twitter with any election year crackdown that partisans can portray as biased.

Subtle differences in language could avoid tripping up, or delay enforcement of, tech companies’ policies. A user may suggest that a particular polling place might be dangerous or violent without providing evidence or specifics, making it harder to deem the information false, says Nate Persily, a Stanford law professor and election law expert. “What we’ve learned in the last three years of disinformation research is that you can achieve false beliefs by saying things that are either technically true, or at least technically not false,” Persily says.

Social Media Braces for a Deluge of Voter Misinformation

A tweet that says police officers or U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are monitoring polling places could persuade Black and Hispanic voters to stay home, says LaShawn Warren, director of government affairs at the Leadership Conference. While Twitter could remove such a post—after spending hours verifying whether it’s correct—a text or WhatsApp message with a similar warning would be a lot harder to stop.

The Black Lives Matter protests that have erupted nationwide could be fodder for voter intimidation efforts by stoking suspicions that an individual’s vote doesn’t matter. During the 2016 campaign, Russian operators targeted Black people with memes saying “I WON’T VOTE, WILL YOU?” or “Everybody SUCKS, We’re Screwed 2016.” Warren says that “gave people the impression that they were actually doing the right thing in protesting racial injustice by not participating in the process.”

Experts are unconvinced that laws or regulation will stop voter suppression on social media, in part because enforcement will take too long. By the time anyone is caught, fake information will have spread far and wide. That makes tech companies the “legislative, judicial, and executive branches when it comes to policy preventing voter suppression,” Persily says.
 
Read next: Four Antitrust Questions Congress Should Ask Big Tech

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