Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
This first appeared in NPR’s New Normal newsletter. Register here to get early access to more stories about how we’re adapting to a changing world.
I got a surprise when I opened Twitter the other morning — and no, it wasn’t because of the latest tweet from new owner Elon Musk.
At the top of my feed was a colorful graphic announcing, “Time to count all votes.” He gave a few more details about why (predicted winners in some contests may not be announced immediately) and a caveat: “This means you may encounter unconfirmed claims that a candidate has won their race.” Below that were two buttons to “find out more” and “learn how postal voting is safe and secure.”
I immediately recognized what I was seeing: a “prebank”.
A vaccine against false claims
Twitter is just one of several companies, government agencies and civic groups experimenting with this strategy, which is based on a simple idea: Tell people a little bit of misleading information so they’re better equipped to recognize and resist it. if they encounter it in the future. Think of it as a vaccine against false claims—in fact, it stems from an area of social psychology research called inoculation theory.
Research into how they work and how long they last is still in its early days — and everyone I spoke to about the strategy emphasized that it’s only part of a larger fight to protect elections, and democracy in general, from eroding influence. deliberate lies.
But companies, including Twitter and Google, have seen encouraging results, and are putting resources ahead — in Twitter’s case for this fall’s elections in the U.S. and Brazil, and in Google’s case for Europe’s refugee crisis.
Elon Musk’s take on Twitter
For now, anyway. Because the next thing I immediately thought when I saw that tweet was, how long is this going to take?
Which brings me back to Elon Musk. The richest man in the world now owns Twitter and things are already changing. The site saw a surge in hate speech shortly after news broke that he had taken over. Twitter and outside researchers said a coordinated campaign launched by far-right platforms was partly to blame. Trolls goaded each other into posting racist slurs and anti-Semitic memes on Twitter, in an apparent attempt to make it look like Musk had followed through on his promises to loosen the platform’s rules against things like abuse, harassment and fraudulent claims in the name free speech.
Musk says no rules have changed yet, and that he won’t make any major adjustments — including reinstating banned users like former president Donald Trump — until he creates a “content moderation council.”
New owner, new rules?
But as the trolling campaign shows, his ownership is already having an impact. And Musk himself is engaging in his characteristic chaos: one moment pledging to advertisers that Twitter won’t become “a free-for-all hellscape,” the next tweeting about his 112 million followers, an embarrassingly embarrassing conspiracy theory baseless for the violent attack on Paul Pelosi. (Musk eventually deleted the tweet, but not before it was retweeted and liked tens of thousands of times.)
That has made many people — including people inside Twitter who work on trust and security — increasingly angry about the company’s willingness and capacity to deal with misleading voting and candidate information, threats to election workers and the possibility of premature or false claims of victory.
This week, Twitter froze some employees’ access to content moderation tools, Bloomberg reported. According to employees, Musk also laid off some employees on Friday, including members of the curation team that tackles misinformation and contextualizes news on the platform.
“We’re still implementing our rules at scale,” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of security and integrity, said in response to Bloomberg’s story.
But what happens when the person who breaks them is the owner, CEO and sole director of Twitter?
That’s just one of the questions my colleagues and I on NPR’s disinformation and democracy team will be exploring as we head into the midterms, the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign, and major elections around the world.
