How Social Platforms Are Scrambling to Slow the Spread of Election Falsehoods

One tactic you'll probably encounter are the labels and links social media companies are adding to some posts, including those they identify as misleading.

Facebook says it added such labels to 150 million pieces of content between March and September of this year. Twitter and YouTube use similar labels.

Social media companies have also been making it harder for people to find and share some kinds of posts, without labeling them.

For instance, in July Twitter started testing an alert box that asks users if they’d like to stop and read an article before they retweet a link to it. Twitter says early results show the feature encourages people to open articles 40 percent more often. Starting Oct. 20 and continuing through the election, Twitter says it's adding “some extra friction” to retweets by prompting people to add a comment before they retweet a post.

The techniques are sometimes called “virality circuit breakers,” and the idea is to slow problematic posts before they go viral.

In a similar vein, YouTube sometimes keeps certain problematic videos out of users' recommendation lists. Such videos might promote phony miracle cures for a serious illness or make blatantly false claims about historic events such as 9/11. According to the company, the tactic is effective.

You'll probably see fewer political ads on social media right now, especially ones that refer to breaking news.

Facebook barred advertisers from purchasing new political ads starting a week before the election, and says the ban will continue for an unspecified length of time after.

Google says it will place a moratorium on ads on its platforms related to the election while votes are being counted. Political ads are allowed on Snapchat, but a spokesperson told CR that they must go through a human review process before posting and that they must be factual.

In addition, all political ads are banned on Twitter, Tik-Tok, and Pinterest.

Experts on social media and misinformation say that ads are just a small part of how conspiracy theories, deliberately misleading information, and lies about the voting process spread on social media platforms. During the 2016 election, Facebook says, approximately 126 million people—about 1 in 3 Americans—may have been exposed to about 80,000 pieces of content sponsored by Russian state actors and their proxies, and spread by regular accounts, not ads.

But that doesn't mean these rules won't help, says Harvard’s Douek. “Advertising policies are the lowest hanging fruit," she says. "I'll take it."

The most extreme thing social media companies do is to delete content or cancel entire user accounts.

The clearest example of this is how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms have been trying to tamp down QAnon messages. The wide-ranging conspiracy theory alleges that the President Donald Trump is waging a secret war against prominent Democrats and deep-state actors who worship Satan and run an international child sex-trafficking ring.

Reddit banned a number of QAnon-related groups in 2018 and expanded its takedowns this summer in response to harassment and incitements to violence among Q followers. Other platforms have recently started deleting accounts linked to QAnaon as well as groups devoted to the Boogaloo, a far-right, antigovernment movement. Facebook, reversing a longstanding policy, said it would start removing Holocaust-denial content.

Some critics of these companies say they should have acted more forcefully earlier, before QAnon, in particular, exploded in popularity on the platforms.

Questions about where social media companies should draw the lines around free speech are complicated, says Brendan Nyhan, a political science professor at Dartmouth College who studies media and misinformation.

But, he says, they should explain their decisions better. "There needs to be more accountability and more discretion about their decisions, and the effects those decisions have," Nyhan says.