Social Platforms Show Improvement But Fall Short on Election Misinformation

Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube take unprecedented steps to combat election misinformation by deploying new risk-reduction tools. Twitter labels and obscures false tweets, prevents retweets, and stops recommending inaccurate content, while Facebook applies warning labels and shuts down rapidly growing groups organized around made-up voter fraud. These actions show that social media platforms possess the technical capability to intervene when political disinformation threatens the democratic process.

Despite these interventions, the platforms still allow false claims to reach enormous audiences before taking action. For example, Facebook posts falsely asserting that thousands of dead Pennsylvanians vote reach up to 11.3 million people, and Spanish-language disinformation plays a substantial role in shaping the results in Florida. The platforms rely on three main strategies to reduce this risk: adding friction to slow the spread of content, boosting authoritative news sources, and enforcing pre-announced policies.

While the major social networks implement these tools better than ever before, their execution remains inconsistent, slow, and lacking in transparency. Techniques like adding friction through labels and click-through prompts help move the digital media environment toward one optimized for quality rather than pure speed. However, the delayed and uneven application of these circuit breakers and sharing limits reveals that major tech companies still struggle to stop disinformation flares before they blaze out of control.

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