Corporate Accountability

Civil rights, democracy, and public interest groups are calling out the major social media companies for not doing enough to combat election disinformation and urging them to take steps to combat and curb the rampant problem in the final weeks before this year’s midterm elections. In a letter to the CEOs of Meta (Facebook), Twitter, YouTube, Snap, Instagram, TikTok, and Alphabet, the groups urged the platforms to do more to combat the proliferation of election disinformation on their platforms with a particular focus on combatting the ‘Big Lie’, preventing disinformation targeting non-English speaking communities, and creating more friction to reduce the distribution of content containing electoral disinformation.

“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,” Yosef Getachew, a media and democracy program director at Common Cause, a government watchdog, told the Post in August. “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.’”

More emphasis should be placed on removing false and misleading posts, said Yosef Getachew, media and democracy program director at nonpartisan group Common Cause. “Pointing them to other sources isn’t enough,” he said.

This decision may have consequences for voters in 2022, said Yosef Getachew, media and democracy program director at Common Cause, a Washington, D.C.-based public interest group. (Common Cause supports PolitiFact's Spanish fact-checking in 2022.) Many people still believe the 2020 election was stolen, and candidates have been sharing that message. "By not combating this, they're helping fuel the narrative that this big lie was accurate, when it's not," said Getachew. Emma Steiner, a disinformation researcher at Common Cause, said she still sees unmarked tweets falsely claiming that mail ballot drop boxes aren’t safe. (Drop boxes are secure boxes, often placed outside polling sites or government buildings, into which voters can drop completed ballots received by mail. The boxes often have more security features than standard mailboxes and have been used in some jurisdictions for decades).  Platforms don’t share data proactively, Steiner said, so it’s hard to gauge exactly how many posts with election-related falsehoods get sent around. It took PolitiFact about 30 seconds in the Twitter search tool — trying terms like "ballot mules" and "dead voters" — to find multiple false claims about elections.

“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.

On Wednesday July 20, 2022, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a markup of the “American Data Privacy and Protection Act” (H.R. 8152). The bill would establish a comprehensive national data privacy and data security framework. Among other provisions, the framework includes: data minimization provisions that will prevent companies from collecting consumer data beyond what is necessary to provide products or services; individual rights allowing consumers to access, correct, and delete their data; and civil rights protections that prohibit discriminatory data practices. The legislation is the first comprehensive privacy bill to gain bipartisan and bicameral support.