Disinformation

Suzanne Almeida, director of state operations for Common Cause, a government accountability watchdog group, said that while her organization had received numerous reports about people monitoring polling locations with cameras, in most of those situations, there was no direct intimidation of voters. “I am happy to report that today has been relatively quiet on the political violence front,” she said.

“The most concerning thing is the way those isolated incidents are being used to spread mis- and disinformation and lies around the election in an attempt to undermine people’s confidence and faith in the election,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for the nonpartisan group Common Cause.

Emma Steiner, a disinformation analyst at government transparency advocacy group Common Cause, said the new subscription service worsens pre-existing problems that owe to the trust engendered by the platform's verification model. "At Twitter, there's been a long standing disparity between what Twitter says a check mark is for: Authenticity," Steiner told ABC News. "And what people interpret it as: Authority." "The new policy makes this division more confusing," she added.

The nonpartisan watchdog group Common Cause, which monitors social media for voter suppression efforts, said that Twitter took no action on high-profile posts that the organization flagged on Tuesday as problematic. Common Cause said Twitter posts from Republican candidates Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kari Lake should have included warning labels under the company's civic integrity policy, which governs misleading tweets about elections. Posts by Greene and Lake drew tens of thousands of likes and retweets on Twitter. Common Cause also noted a "big slowdown" in Twitter's response time since Friday, when layoffs gutted many of the company's teams responsible for elevating credible information. "Twitter is hopeless and not responding beyond replying that they are looking into something and then going dark on it for days," the group said, noting that the company's response time was normally about one to three hours. Also drawing engagement were posts baselessly warning voters that Wi-Fi networks at polling locations could enable hacking of voting machines, Jesse Littlewood, vice president for campaigns at Common Cause, told a news briefing. The falsehoods appeared to originate on messaging app Telegram before spreading to more mainstream social media services, according to Common Cause. A Reuters review found examples on Twitter, TikTok and Meta's (META.O) Facebook.

“We have never certified an election on election night,” said Sylvia Albert, director of elections for Common Cause, a non-profit group that has been tracking election misinformation. “This is nothing new. It’s just people trying to undermine faith in elections.”

“There are attempts to use those election administration and voting machine issues that election workers are working to fix to spin a disinformation campaign,” said Jesse Littlewood, vice president of campaigns at Common Cause, which advocates for voting access.