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“We are glad to see that the American Data Privacy and Protection Act is going to a full committee markup, and that Republican and Democratic leadership on the House Energy & Commerce Committee has come together on a comprehensive privacy proposal to protect our data online," Common Cause media and democracy program director Yosef Getachew said. Watchdog group Common Cause is particularly heartened by the inclusion of civil-rights protections, given that privacy and data abuses have hit minority communities particularly hard, the organization said.

Members of the nonpartisan organization Common Cause say they’ve tracked an increase in disinformation online in 2016 and 2018 with a significant surge in voting related disinformation during the 2020 election cycle. “Disinformation agents are seeking to keep voters from casting their ballots by spreading content designed to confuse voters about the time, place and manner how to vote, intimidate or harass them from going to the polls,” said Yosef Getachew, Media & Democracy Program Director at Common Cause.

On May 17, as several states held their primary elections, Jesse Littlewood searched the internet using a tool called CrowdTangle to spot the false narratives he knew could change perceptions of the results: damaging stories about ballots being collected and dropped off in bulk by unauthorized people, who the misinformation peddlers called “ballot mules.” Littlewood, the vice president for campaigns with the voter advocacy group Common Cause, easily came across dozens of posts showing a “Wanted” poster falsely accusing a woman of being a ballot mule in Gwinnett County, Georgia. He raised alarm bells with Facebook and Twitter. “This was going to lead to threats and intimidation of this individual who may be an elections worker, and there was no evidence that this person was doing anything illegal,” Littlewood said. “It needed to be removed.” Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook owns the search tool Littlewood used, and the company has for months kept its plans for CrowdTangle a mystery. Meta has been reducing its support for the product. The company is expected to eventually scrap it, and has declined to say when it plans to do so. Not knowing the future of CrowdTangle or what Meta chooses to replace it with, Littlewood said, endangers planning for future elections. The group has thousands of volunteers working in shifts to identify false information online, and CrowdTangle is indispensible to the process. Common Cause’s work “would be impossible to do without a tool that looks across Facebook,” Littlewood said. CrowdTangle gives insight into posts on Instagram, Twitter and Reddit too. “And we all know that the midterms are testing grounds for 2024, when the level of disinformation will be even higher.” Researchers don’t just rely on the tool, but on the companies reacting to the harmful content reports they make. Twitter removed the misinformation Littlewood flagged in May; on Facebook, which didn’t respond to his warning, at least 16 of the posts remained in mid-June. Facebook took them down after media outlets, including ProPublica and Bloomberg News, reached out.

Emma Steiner, a disinformation analyst with Common Cause who sent warnings to the social-media companies, says the lack of action suggests that tech companies relaxed their efforts to police election-related threats ahead of the 2022 midterms. “This is the new playbook, and I’m worried that platforms are not prepared to deal with this tactic that encourages dangerous behavior,” Steiner said.

“They have been leaving up content around the 2020 election saying the election was stolen,” said Yosef Getachew, media and democracy program director at advocacy group Common Cause. “You have candidates saying we have had prior elections stolen, so this one will be stolen as well, so it’s an ongoing issue that we are trying to get them to take seriously.”

Yosef Getachew, director of the media and democracy program at the advocacy group Common Cause, told me a “wrong and bad” standard applied to individuals doesn’t mean much. Jan. 6 “wasn’t one or two tweets here or there. It was a massive coordination from numerous organizations,” he said. “You have to have policies that prohibit coordinated efforts to use platforms to incite violence or spread information that leads to the loss of individuals’ right to vote.” Common Cause and about 120 progressive groups appealed to Twitter, Facebook, and all the big social media companies this week to do more to protect democracy with better content enforcement and standards.