News Clips

“High-profile disinformation spreaders and other bad actors are continuing to use social media platforms to disseminate messages that undermine trust in elections,” read a letter sent to chief executives and signed by more than 100 groups lead by Common Cause. “Candidates are using the Big Lie as a platform plank to pre-emptively declare voter fraud in order to dispute the results of the 2022 election,” they wrote. “This is damaging American democracy by undermining faith in the integrity of our elections.”

Former acting FCC chairman and Common Cause special adviser Michael Copps was on the same page when it came to Sohn being a key piece in the broadband connectivity puzzle. “[N]one of the White House’s initiatives around halting ongoing consolidation in the broadband sector, restoring a free and open internet, and ensuring marginalized communities have equitable access to communications services can be fully achieved if the FCC remains deadlocked,” he said in a statement following the event. “Congress must take action now to ensure Ms. Sohn receives a vote,” Copps said.  Copps said those gatekeepers were conducting a “sleazy” campaign to undermine Sohn because they knew that “a functional FCC would hold them accountable and prevent them from engaging in anticompetitive and discriminatory practices that undermine our ability to get online.”

"As we saw with Jan. 6, Trump gets so much engagement that his network of high-profile politicians and influencers can keep disinformation flowing at a fever pitch. Some Jan. 6 rioters have been citing election disinformation as a reason behind their actions at the Capitol. He’d be able to essentially restart with this built-in network that can be weaponized against democracy. Either way, consistent content moderation is vital, not just at election time but during non-election periods, when platforms like Twitter and Facebook have disbanded their teams or stopped moderating." - Yosef Getachew Q&A with Todd Zwillich

Being a private entity doesn’t mean that a corporate space can do anything it pleases, particularly as shown by large social media sites that have a direct impact on elections and Democracy itself. Yosef Getachew, director of the Media and Democracy Program at Common Cause, explained the problem of “prioritizing profits over the public good.” “Social-media platforms have been complicit in the spread of disinformation and other harmful content that has suppressed votes and sparked real-world violence,” Getachew said in a statement. “Their actions have allowed high-profile disinformation spreaders and other bad actors to continue using social media to spread content designed to undermine trust in our elections. With midterm elections fast approaching, platforms must adopt these safety protocols, including the robust and consistent enforcement of their civic-integrity policies 365 days a year.” 

The voting advocacy group Common Cause will rely on thousands of volunteers like Bowers to identify misinformation floating around online and push for Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to take down the most egregious falsehoods. False claims about voting times, locations or eligibility, for example, are banned across Twitter and Meta’s platforms, which include Facebook and Instagram. During the 2020 election, platforms applied fact checks, labeled or removed more than 300 pieces of popular, false content that Common Cause turned up. More recently, in Texas, more than 100 volunteers worked four-hour shifts to monitor false claims coming out of the state’s primary election in March. The most frequent conspiracy theory shared that night claimed that staffing shortages at polling locations were deliberate, Bowers noted. “Texas is kind of the playbook for things to come,” said Emma Steiner, a disinformation analyst for the group. “My major concern is that local issues, like with these staff or ballot shortages, will be amplified by influencers or partisan actors with a national platform as signs of malign interference in elections; it’s a pretty recognized pattern from 2020.”

“I can generally say that there’s certainly the potential for influence from industry giving money to legislators,” said Yosef Getachew, director of the Media and Democracy Program at Common Cause. ... Getachew noted that the implications of privacy laws extend well past traditional technology companies. “A lot of the telecom companies have engaged in certain data practices that implicate them and privacy bills, and a lot of telecom companies are working businesses outside of the traditional telecom model,” said Getachew. “So for example, take Comcast — they provide a cable service, broadband service and mobile service. They are potentially using all those data points interchangeably to build profiles and learn more about the customer base.”