SAN FRANCISCO – Social media companies are offering few specifics as they share their plans for protecting the US midterm elections.
Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are generally staying the course of the 2020 voting season, which was marred by conspiracies and culminated in the January 6 uprising at the US Capitol.
The video app TikTok, which has grown in popularity since the last election cycle while cementing its place as a hot spot for disinformation, announced Wednesday that it is opening a voting center that will help people find their seats. voting and candidate information.
The hub will appear in videos about the US election and in the feeds of users searching for election-related hashtags. TikTok is also partnering with voting advocacy groups to provide specialized voting information for college students, people who are deaf, military members living overseas and those with prior criminal convictions.
TikTok, like other platforms, would not provide details on the number of full-time employees or how much money it is devoting to midterm US efforts aimed at promoting accurate voting information and countering disinformation.
The company said it is working with more than a dozen fact-checking organizations, including PolitiFact and US-based Lead Stories, to define misinformation. TikTok declined to say how many videos have been fact-checked on its site. The company will use a combination of humans and artificial intelligence to detect and remove threats to election workers as well as voting disinformation.
TikTok said it is also watching for influencers who break its rules by accepting money outside the platform to promote political issues or candidates, a problem that came to light during the 2020 election, TikTok head of security Eric Han said. The company is trying to educate creators and agencies about its rules, which include banning political ads.
“With the work we do, there is no end,” Han said.
Meta Platforms Inc., which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced Tuesday that its approach to this election cycle is “mostly consistent with policies and safeguards” from 2020.
“As we did in 2020, we have a team dedicated to fighting election and voter interference, while also helping people get reliable information about when and how to vote,” wrote Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of affairs global, in a blog post on Tuesday. .
Meta declined to say how many people he has dedicated to his election team responsible for monitoring mandates, only that there are “hundreds of people in more than 40 teams.”
As in 2020, Clegg wrote, the company will remove misinformation about election dates, polling locations, voter registration and election results. For the first time, Meta said it will also display announcements about the US election in languages other than English.
Meta also said it will reduce how often it uses tags in election-related posts that direct people to credible information. The company said its users found the tags overused. Some critics have also said that the labels were often too generic and repetitive.
Compared to previous years, however, Meta’s public communication of his response to election disinformation has been quiet, the Associated Press reported earlier this month.
Between 2018 and 2020, the company issued more than 30 statements laying out specifics on how it would crack down on US election disinformation, prevent foreign opponents from running ads or posts about votes, and crack down on divisive hate speech. As of Tuesday’s blog post, Meta had released only a one-page document outlining plans for the fall election, though potential threats to the vote persist.
Twitter, meanwhile, is sticking with its misinformation labels, though it has redesigned them since 2020 based in part on user feedback. The company activated its “civic integrity policy” last week, meaning tweets containing damaging misinformation about the election are tagged with links to credible information. The tweets themselves will not be promoted or amplified by the platform.
The company, which like TikTok does not allow political ads, is focusing on putting verified and reliable information in front of its users. This may include links to state-specific local election information centers as well as nonpartisan public service announcements for voters.
