Social media giants are also under heavy scrutiny
for their efforts to police misinformation about
the election. Twitter and Facebook have imposed
a misinformation label on content from the
president, who has about 80 million followers.
Trump has raised the baseless prospect of mass
fraud in the vote-by-mail process.
Starting this week, Facebook didn’t accept any
new political advertising. Previously booked
political ads will be able to run until the polls
close Nov. 3, when all political advertising will
temporarily be banned. Google, which owns
YouTube, also is halting political ads after the polls
close. Twitter banned all political ads last year.
Democrats have focused their criticism of social
media mainly on hate speech, misinformation
and other content that can incite violence or
keep people from voting. They have criticized
the tech CEOs for failing to police content,
homing in on the platforms’ role in hate crimes
and the rise of white nationalism in the U.S.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have
scrambled to stem the tide of material that
incites violence and spreads lies and baseless
conspiracy theories.
The companies reject accusations of bias but
have wrestled with how strongly they should
intervene. They have often gone out of their
way not to appear biased against conservative
views — a posture that some say effectively
tilts them toward those viewpoints. The effort
has been especially strained for Facebook,
which was caught off guard in 2016, when it
was used as a conduit by Russian agents to
spread misinformation benefiting Trump’s
presidential campaign.