Social media companies are offering few details as they share their plans for securing the US midterm elections. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have generally been on hold since the 2020 voting season, which was marred by conspiracy and lost in the January 6 riots in the US Capitol.
Video app TikTok, which has grown in popularity since the last election cycle and positioned itself as a problem spot for misinformation, announced Wednesday that it is launching an election center that will help people find polling places and candidate information.
The center will show up in the feeds of users searching for election-related hashtags. TikTok is partnering with voting advocacy groups to provide specialized voting information to college students, veterans, military members living overseas, and those with past criminal convictions.
TikTok, like other platforms, would not provide details on the number of full-time employees or how much money it is devoting to the US midterm efforts, which are aimed at accurate polling and countering disinformation.
The company said it is working with more than a dozen fact-checking organizations, including US-based PolitiFact and Lead Stories, to remove misinformation. TikTok declined to say how many videos on its site have been verified for authenticity. The company will use a combination of human and artificial intelligence to detect and eliminate threats to election workers as well as voting misinformation.
TikTok said it is also keeping an eye on influencers who break its rules by accepting money from the platform to promote political issues or candidates, a problem that came to the fore in the 2020 election, said Eric Hahn, TikTok’s head of security. The company is trying to educate producers and agencies about its rules, which include a ban on political ads.
“There’s no finish line in the work we’re doing,” Han said.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced on Tuesday that its approach to this election cycle from 2020 is “largely aligned with policies and security”.
“As we did in 2020, we have a dedicated team to combat election and voter interference and help people get reliable information about when and how to vote,” Nick Clegg, META’s president of global affairs, wrote in a blog post Tuesday. .
Meta declined to say how many people he has dedicated to his election team responsible for monitoring the midterms, saying only that “there are hundreds of people in more than 40 teams.”
As of 2020, Clegg wrote, the company will remove false information about election dates, polling places, voter registration and election results. For the first time, Meta said it will also show notifications related to the US election in languages other than English.
Meta also said it will reduce the number of times it uses labels on election-related posts to direct people to credible information. The company says its users have found the labels overused. Some critics have also said that the labels are often too generic and repetitive.
Compared to previous years, however, META’s public communication about its response to election misinformation has been decidedly quieter, the Associated Press reported earlier this month.
Between 2018 and 2020, the company issued more than 30 statements detailing how it would prevent misinformation about the US election, prevent foreign opponents from running ads or posts around the vote, and reduce divisive hate speech. As of Tuesday’s blog post, Metta had released only a one-page document outlining plans for the fall election, despite potential threats to the vote.
Twitter, meanwhile, is sticking with its own misinformation labels, though it has redesigned them based on user feedback since 2020. The company activated its “civil integrity policy” last week, meaning tweets containing damaging misinformation about the election are labeled with links to credible information. Tweets will not be promoted or amplified by the platform itself.
A company like TikTok, which doesn’t allow political ads, is focusing on putting verified, reliable information in front of its users. They may include links to state-specific centers for local election information as well as nonpartisan public service announcements for voters.
