“For Democrats, we weren’t taking down enough, and for Republicans we were taking down too much,” said the former director of public policy at Facebook.
Social media companies are receding from their role as watchdogs against political misinformation, abandoning their most aggressive efforts to police online falsehoods in a trend expected to profoundly affect the 2024 presidential election.
Trump capitalised on those relaxed standards in his recent interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, hosted by X. The former president punctuated the conversation, which streamed on Wednesday night during the first Republican primary debate of the 2024 campaign, with false claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” and that the Democrats had “cheated” in order to elect Biden.
Meta spokeswoman Erin McPike said in a statement that “protecting the US 2024 elections is one of our top priorities, and our integrity efforts continue to lead the industry.” Continuing to enforce the ban would curtail political speech without “meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm,” the company argued in a blog post.
That’s a departure from the approach tech companies took after Russia manipulated social media to attempt to swing the 2016 election to Trump. The incident transformed Mark Zuckerberg into a symbol of corporate recklessness. So the Meta CEO vowed to do better. In early January 2021, rioters incited by Trump assaulted the US Capitol after organising themselves, in part, on Facebook and Twitter. In response, Meta, Twitter, Google and other tech companies suspended Trump, forcibly removing the president from their platforms.But as the tech giants grappled with narrowing profits, this proactive stance began to dissolve.
On his first night as owner, Musk fired Trust and Safety head Vijaya Gadde, whose job it was to guard the companies’ users against fraud, harassment and offensive content. Soon after, just days before the midterms, the company laid off more than half of its 7500 workers, crippling the teams responsible for making high-stake decisions about what to do about falsehoods.
Mark Finchem, the Republican candidate seeking to oversee Arizona’s election system as the state’s secretary of state, made a fundraising pitch on the eve of the 2022 election, falsely arguing on Facebook and Twitter that his Democratic opponent, Adrian Fontes, was a member of the Chinese Communist Party and a “cartel criminal” who had “rigged elections” before.
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