How Facebook and Twitter plan to handle election day disinformation

A man in the Atlanta suburbs was scrolling Facebook in late October when an ad popped up claiming his polling place had changed. Facebook’s decision to ban new political ads beginning a week before election day came under fire from the Biden campaign after what the company calls “technical flaws” in its software caused a number of existing ad campaigns that were supposed to continue running to be shut down in error. The company will also direct users to an election information page, which will report results from state election officials, or from “at least two authoritative, national news outlets that make independent election calls.” YouTube has no specific policy for this scenario, though it will direct users to Associated Press results for all election information. Snapchat added a clause to its preexisting community guidelines in September, expanding its rule against spreading harmful or malicious false information, “such as denying the existence of tragic events” or “unsubstantiated medical claims” to also cover “undermining the integrity of civic processes.” While viral fake news from overseas sources continues to spread across social networks in the U.S. — one town in North Macedonia continues to be the apparent source of a number of fake conservative news sites — the EIP has documented a rise in domestic fake news campaigns spread and amplified by verified right-wing media accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. A conservative media personality, Elijah Schaffer, tweeted a photo of ballot envelopes from the 2018 election being recycled in a Sonoma County landfill to his more than 200,000 followers with the caption “SHOCKING: 1,000+ mail-in ballots found in a dumpster in California,” adding, “Big if true.” This was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr. to his 5.9 million followers, and turned into an article on a conservative website that falsely stated that these were unopened 2020 ballots being discarded.