Facebook, Meta court misinformation disaster for midterm elections

With less than two weeks until the midterm elections, Meta and its platforms are careening in for a bumpy landing that could leave our fragile democracy in chaos. All signs point to an unwillingness to take the steps necessary to safeguard the election on its platforms. 

Facebook and other top social media networks claim they’ve stepped up moderation and fact-checking in preparation for the midterms. But these efforts are disastrously insufficient.

To address this dangerous situation and safeguard the election, Meta and other platforms must make a rapid course correction, including investing more in content-moderation staff and rooting out accounts promoting conspiracies about poll rigging and false information about voting hours and locations.

Social media feeds vs. free and fair elections

Here’s how this massive company’s failure to fix its feed poses a fundamental threat to free and fair elections:

►Slashing election integrity. Meta has cut its election-integrity staff by 80% – from 300 people to 60, according to The New York Times. This means fewer experts on hand to detect election lies, voting misinformation and foreign interference in the midterms – and put in place the safeguards to stop them.

►Misinforming Spanish speakers. Many Spanish-language pages pushing former President Donald Trump’s Big Lie are still up on Meta platforms (even when their English-language counterparts have been taken down). The content ranges from baseless claims about voting machines to lies about dead people voting – all specifically designed to mislead or suppress the votes of the Latinx community. 

►Stoking election violence. The Change the Terms coalition recently shared with Meta Facebook posts that target and harass election workers, as well as posts labeling the Jan. 6 insurrection a hoax. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism has identified ongoing efforts by extremist groups and known election disinformers to use social media platforms to threaten election workers, threaten candidates, spread the Big Lie, demonize immigrants, attack Black and brown communities and intentionally confuse voters in six battleground states. 

Will young people turn out for midterms?:As Gen Z, we’re told we will ‘fix everything.’ Voting in the midterms is the first step.

►De-platforming outside researchers. Researchers and academics face widespread problems accessing election information with the CrowdTangle tool that measures the flow of content across its platforms, and Meta has fewer public-facing information guides on the election than it has in previous cycles. New York University data researcher Laura Edelson – whom Meta cut off from accessing this data – recently said the platform’s lack of data transparency presents very real problems to those trying to alert users to the ongoing creation and spread of anti-democratic content.

►Flirting with Trumpism. Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg recently indicated that he was considering allowing Trump back on the company’s platforms in January, in spite of the former president’s use of his platform Truth Social to threaten violence, post QAnon conspiracies and, most recently, engage in blatant antisemitism. 

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►Failing to enforce. Meta continues to exempt politicians from its third-party fact-checking program, allowing them to run advertising with false claims. Recent research found that Meta’s ad library – which it supposedly uses to track all political ads on its platforms –can’t even correctly determine what constitutes a political ad and what doesn’t.  

Don’t let Facebook’s history repeat

In 2020, Meta (then Facebook) acceded to pressure to stop election misinformation and implemented what whistleblower Frances Haugen later called “break-glass” measures designed to slow the spread of the worst misinformation during important elections and times of crisis. This included changing the platform’s news feed to “uprank” credible news sources in an effort to drown out misinformation. We know Meta can act now if it chooses to do so. 

Red and blue America don’t trust each other. That’s driving us dangerously apart.

Meta must prioritize credible news and information in its feed by boosting the algorithm tied to “news ecosystem quality,” an internal news rating system that assigns a higher value to quality reporting and, by default, downranks hate and misinformation. (The company took this exact measure across its platforms following the 2020 election.)

Meta can reject any advertising that delegitimizes election outcomes at a national, state and local level – including from candidates themselves. It can ban violative accounts and remove all posts that incite election violence.

Meta should prioritize review of possible harassment of election workers, which is happening across its platforms. The company is well aware that this is happening, but many threatening posts remain up. 

Do political debates even matter?:Was Ryan or Vance, Walker or Warnock tougher? Who cares? Political debates are overrated.

As Election Day nears, it’s not too late for action 

Even though voting is already underway in some states, and much damage is already done, Meta can still make an immediate, urgent investment in non-English-language moderation of election content, using qualified moderators rather than relying on artificial intelligence. 

Finally, Meta can listen to itself – its own civic and integrity team recommendations for the 2022 election have yet to be fully implemented, but include crucial steps like dialing back reliance on what the company calls downstream “meaningful social interactions”  that spark engagement but can also drive the spread of misinformation. 

Midterm election polls:We’re addicted to midterm election polls. And it’s not doing us any good.

These changes shouldn’t be enacted just for the days immediately following the election. We learned the hard way on Jan. 6, 2021, what happens when platforms turn the torrent of extremist content back on, as Facebook did in late 2020. Violative content about the electoral process and democracy writ large does not have an “end” time after an election occurs. We urge Meta to keep election-integrity efforts in place indefinitely. 

These demands should also be embraced by Meta’s shareholders, elected officials and the largely impotent Facebook Oversight Board, which has not engaged substantively on Meta’s failure to prepare for the 2022 election. 

We’ve seen the corrosive impacts of social media on democracy these past few years. With just a couple weeks until Election Day, it will get much worse without immediate action. 

Heidi Beirich, Ph.D., is chief strategy officer and co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. Jessica J. González is co-CEO of Free Press. Both are members of the Real Facebook Oversight Board.