Election experts on Tuesday reported a proliferation of new lies across Twitter and other social media services as Americans voted in a midterm election, four days after Twitter Inc fired half its staff and new boss. Elon Musk Tweeted a recommendation to vote for Republican candidates.
Common Cause, the nonpartisan watchdog group that tracks social media for voter suppression efforts, said Twitter took no action on the high-profile post, which the organization flagged as problematic on Tuesday.
The US congressional elections presented a new test for social media companies, which have for years struggled to balance free expression against increasing potentially harmful commentary. Although company policies enable them to restrict misinformation, enforcement has been unclear, and the recent turmoil at Twitter has placed it under special scrutiny.
There were calls on social media on Tuesday for the right wing to falsely accuse Democrats of voting glitches in some places.
Common Cause said Twitter posts by Republican candidates Marjorie Taylor Green and Kari Lake should include warning labels under the company’s civil integrity policy, which regulates misleading tweets about elections. Green and Lake’s post received thousands of likes and retweets on Twitter.
Common Cause also noted a “major slowdown” in Twitter’s response times from Friday, when the layoffs blamed many of the company’s teams for increasing credible information.
“Twitter is frustrating and not responding beyond saying they’re seeing something and then going dark for days,” the group said, noting that the company’s response times typically range from about one to one. It was three hours.
Twitter, which lost several members of its communications team in the layoffs, did not respond to requests for comment.
Earlier Tuesday, Joel Roth, head of security and integrity for both Musk and Twitter, tweeted that the company would maintain and enforce its electoral integrity policies through the mid-term.
In May more than 120 advocacy organizations, including Common Cause, urged social media companies to introduce “circuit breakers” to stop the rapid spread of misleading election information by popular accounts.
On Tuesday, discussions on Twitter focused on real voting problems in states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania, according to research groups studying online election information.
Activity increased after popular commentators on Twitter – without evidence – attributed the malfunction to attempts by Democrats to stifle Republican voters, according to Election Integrity Partnership, a coalition of research organizations.
Former US President Donald Trump, who has made false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him through widespread voting fraud, posted on his social media app TruthSocial that the issues in some states amounted to a new round of intentional abuse. Is.
Election officials in Arizona’s Maricopa County said the issues experienced Tuesday would not affect the vote count. Officials in Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County extended voting hours to compensate for the problems.
Officials in Cobb County, Georgia, extended the deadline for receiving absentee ballots as some voters did not receive ballots, spreading false claims – mainly on Twitter – that the extension was meant to help “steal” the election. , according to a spokesperson for the Southern Poverty Law Center activist group.
Also attracting engagement were posts warning voters that Wi-Fi networks at polling places could enable hacking of voting machines, Jesse Littlewood, Common Cause’s vice president of campaigns, said at a news briefing.
According to Common Cause, the lie originated on the messaging app Telegram before spreading to more mainstream social media services. A Reuters review found examples on Twitter, TikTok and Meta (Meta.o) Facebook.
read all latest tech news Here