For months, activists have urged tech companies to fight the spread of falsehoods purporting that the 2020 presidential election was stolen — warning that such disinformation could delegitimize the 2022 midterms, in which all seats in the House of Representatives and more than a third of the Senate is up for grabs.
Washington Post: In new election, Big Tech uses old strategies to fight ‘big lie’
08.20.2022 / By Naomi Nix
Washington Post: In new election, Big Tech uses old strategies to fight 'big lie’
Yet social media giants are pushing forward with a familiar playbook to police misinformation this electoral cycle, even as false claims that the last presidential election was fraudulent continue to plague their platforms. …
Misinformation experts warn that the strictness of the companies’ policies and how well they enforce their rules could make the difference between a peaceful transfer of power and an electoral crisis.
“The ‘big lie’ has become embedded in our political discourse, and it’s become a talking point for election-deniers to preemptively declare that the midterm elections are going to be stolen or filled with voter fraud,” said Yosef Getachew, a media and democracy program director at the liberal-leaning government watchdog Common Cause. “What we’ve seen is that Facebook and Twitter aren’t really doing the best job or any job in terms of removing and combating disinformation that’s around the ‘big lie’.”