Meta reduces election misinformation as the midterms approach

WASHINGTON (AP), – Meta, the Facebook owner is slowly reducing some safeguards to thwart foreign interference in U.S. election as November’s midterm elections approach.

This is a stark departure from social media giant’s multibillion dollar efforts to improve accuracy posts about U.S elections and to regain the trust of lawmakers and the general public following outrage at how the company exploited data from people and let falsehoods overrun its website during the 2016 campaign.

The pivot raises alarm over Meta’s priorities, and how others might use the most widely used social media platforms around to make misleading claims and launch fake accounts in order to rile up extremists.

“They aren’t talking about it,” stated Katie Harbath (ex-Policy Director at Facebook), who is now CEO of Anchor Change, a tech and policy company. The best case scenario is that they’re doing some work behind closed doors. Worst-case scenario: They pull back. We don’t know what that will look like for the midterms on the platforms .”

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Meta has indefinitely banned researchers from Facebook’s site, after shutting down a study into the ways in which falsehoods can be amplified through political ads.

CrowdTangle is an online tool the company provided to thousands of journalists and researchers in order for them to identify misinformation and trending posts across Facebook and Instagram. It has been down since then.

The company has been very quiet about its response to the election misinformation. Between 2018 and , the company issued more 30 statements outlining how it would suppress U.S. election malinformation and prevent foreign adversaries running ads and posts about the vote.

Top executives held question-and-answer sessions with journalists about their new policies. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, posted on the site promising to remove false information. He also wrote opinion articles calling to increase regulations for foreign interference in U.S. election via social media.

This year, Meta only published a single-page plan for the fall election. However, the potential dangers to voting remain unclear. Social media is full of false statements about the U.S. Election made by several Republican candidates. Russia and China are continuing to run aggressive social media propaganda campaigns in an effort to further divide American voters.

Meta states that elections are still a top priority. Policies developed over recent years to counter foreign interference or misinformation in elections have been hard-wired into the company’s operations.

“We incorporate the lessons we have learned in new processes, and we have created channels to share information and data with government partners,” said Tom Reynolds, a Meta spokesperson.

He refused to give an estimate of the number of employees who would work on this project in order to fully protect U.S. election results full-time for this year.

During the 2018 electoral cycle, Meta offered tours and photographs to visitors and also produced head counts for the election response room. The New York Times claimed that the number of Meta workers working in this election was reduced from 300 and 60,, a claim Meta contests.

Reynolds stated that Meta will draw hundreds of employees from 40 other departments to help monitor the forthcoming vote along with the election team and its unknown number of workers.

The company continues many of the initiatives that it has developed to reduce election misinformation. This includes a fact-checking programme started in 2016 which enlists help from news outlets to verify the authenticity of the popular falsehoods being spread on Facebook and Instagram. Meta’s fact checking program includes the Associated Press.

Meta also launched a new feature to allow people to look up information about political ads. This allows them search details on how they are targeting individuals based upon their interests through Facebook and Instagram.

Yet Meta has blocked other attempts to find election misinformation on their sites.

It stopped improving CrowdTangle. It is a website that it provided to newsrooms worldwide and provides insight into trending social media content. The website was used by journalists, researchers, and fact-checkers to analyse Facebook content. They also tracked popular misinformation, and who it is.

This tool is “dying”, Brandon Silverman (ex-CEO CrowdTangle) told the Senate Judiciary Committee last spring.

Silverman said to the AP that CrowdTangle was working on improvements that would make it easier for users to find the text in internet memes. These memes can be spread falsehoods, and evade fact-checkers’ oversight.

” “There are many ways to organize the data in a way that makes it usable for different sections of fact-checking, newsrooms, and the wider civil society,” Silverman stated.

Not everyone at Meta was in agreement with this transparent approach, Silverman stated. Silverman stated that the company hasn’t released any updates to CrowdTangle for more than one year and has suffered hours-long outages over recent months.

Meta stopped all efforts to examine how misinformation is spread through political advertisements.

The company has indefinitely suspended access to Facebook from two New York University researchers, who claimed they had collected unauthorised data on the platform. This decision was made hours after Laura Edelson, a NYU professor, said that she had discussed plans to work with Facebook on investigating the disinformation spread on the platform in the wake of the attack on January 6, on the U.S Capitol. House investigators are now looking into the matter.

” What we discovered, after we looked carefully, was that their systems could be dangerous for many of their users,” Edelson stated.

Privately former and current Meta employees claim that exposing the dangers surrounding the American election has caused a public backlash and political opposition for the company.

Republicans regularly accuse Facebook unfairly of censoring conservatives. Some of these people have even been expelled for violating the company’s guidelines. Democrats complain that the tech giant has not done enough to stop disinformation.

” “It’s something so politically fraught that they’re more trying avoiding it than jumping in headfirst,” Harbath said, the ex-Policy Director at Facebook. They see it simply as a huge pile of headaches .”

Despite the fact that the U.S. regulation possibility is no longer an looming threat to the company’s existence, lawmakers have failed to agree on the level of oversight to which the multibillion dollar company should be held.

To avoid this threat, Meta’s top leaders have committed their time, money, and resources to a brand new project over the past few months.

Zuckerberg began a massive rebranding of Facebook in October. He changed the name to Meta Platforms Inc. His social media platforms will be transformed into the metaverse, a virtual reality construction that is a billion times more expensive than the original internet. It’s a 3D version of the Internet.

His posts on his public Facebook page now concentrate on announcements about products, hailing AI, and pictures of him having fun. He does not write blog posts about elections preparedness.

In a post Zuckerberg made last October after an ex-Facebook employee published internal documents that showed how Facebook magnifies hatred and misinformation, the former employee defended Zuckerberg. His followers were reminded by him that he had advocated for modernizing regulations governing elections in the digital age.

” It’s sometimes frustrating to see our good work get misunderstood, particularly for those who make important contributions in safety, integrity and research. He wrote this on October 5. But I do believe it’ll be better over time if we continue to try and do the right thing and deliver experiences that enhance people’s lives .

He discussed Menlo Park’s electoral work last week in a Facebook public post.

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Associated Press technology reporter Barbara Ortutay contributed this report.