◼ POLITICS Bloomberg Businessweek July 27, 202033DATA:
OXFORD
INTERNET
INSTITUTE
THE BOTTOM LINE As the U.S. election nears, social media giants
are preparing for content aimed at suppressing the vote. But such
messages can be hard to stop, election experts say.only going to get intensified and the platforms’
inaction on these issues is going to be increasingly
problematic and increasingly harmful the closer we
get to the election.”
Civic groups are also gearing up to fight back.
Election Protection, a coalition of more than 100
advocacy groups, nonprofits, and government
entities, is hosting hotlines for voters, publicizing
election information, notifying officials and tech
companies about misinformation, and monitoring
Election Day mishaps.
Long before the internet became an essen-
tial campaign tool, political operatives pushed
out deceptive messages about voting. They might
have sent mailers with the wrong election date to
homes in neighborhoods where their opponent
was strong, says Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at
the Brookings Institution. “It’s just a flat-out dirty
trick,” Kamarck says. “It used to happen all the time
pre-internet,” but now it’s cheaper to do it online.
Social media giants learned a lot about how dig-
ital voter suppression works in 2016, when Russia
ran a massive campaign to influence the election in
Donald Trump’s favor, according to the 2018 indict-
ment of Russian nationals by special counsel Robert
Mueller. Tech companies say they’re determined
not to let foreign agents meddle again.
Civic organizations aren’t sanguine—and say it’s
just as likely that homegrown agitators, including
Trump, could try to lead voters astray this time.
An independent civil-rights audit released on July 8
criticized Facebook for being “far too reluctant” to
adopt strong voter suppression standards, includ-
ing failing to take action against the president’s
false posts that California, Michigan, and Nevada
were mailing ballots illegally. The audit concluded
that Trump’s posts were wrong. Facebook said the
president didn’t violate its rules.
Facebook has since started to label all posts that
include voting information with a message that
says “get official voting info” and a link to a gov-
ernment website. It added such a label to a July 21
Trump post saying mail-in ballots would lead to a
“CORRUPT ELECTION” and to a Joe Biden post that
said the election was “just over 100 days” away.
The social media giants are also in the awk-
ward position of having to police content posted
by elected officials who have the power to regu-
late them. Twitter and Facebook have similar
anti-voter-suppression policies, yet have diverged
in how they enforce them, with Twitter acting more
aggressively. Facebook faces antitrust investigations
at state and federal levels and has more to lose than
Twitter with any election year crackdown that par-
tisans can portray as biased.Subtle differences in language could avoid trip-
ping up, or delay enforcement of, tech companies’
policies. A user may suggest that a particular polling
place might be dangerous or violent without provid-
ing evidence or specifics, making it harder to deem
the information false, says Nate Persily, a Stanford
law professor and election law expert. “What we’ve
learned in the last three years of disinformation
research is that you can achieve false beliefs by say-
ing things that are either technically true, or at least
technically not false,” Persily says.
A tweet that says police officers or U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents
are monitoring polling places could persuade
Black and Hispanic voters to stay home, says
LaShawn Warren, director of government affairs
at the Leadership Conference. While Twitter could
remove such a post—after spending hours verifying
whether it’s correct—a text or WhatsApp message
with a similar warning would be a lot harder to stop.
The Black Lives Matter protests that have erupted
nationwide could be fodder for voter intimidation
efforts by stoking suspicions that an individual’s vote
doesn’t matter. During the 2016 campaign, Russian
operators targeted Black people with memes say-
ing “I WON’T VOTE, WILL YOU?” or “Everybody
SUCKS, We’re Screwed 2016.” Warren says that “gave
people the impression that they were actually doing
the right thing in protesting racial injustice by not
participating in the process.”
Experts are unconvinced that laws or regula-
tion will stop voter suppression on social media, in
part because enforcement will take too long. By the
time anyone is caught, fake information will have
spread far and wide. That makes tech companies the
“legislative, judicial, and executive branches when
it comes to policy preventing voter suppression,”
Persily says. �Naomi Nix and Kurt Wagner▲ False information
about when and how
to vote is a problem
on social media, but
so are messages to
avoid polling sites for
safety reasons