Software

On midnight of October 26, Facebook stopped accepting all new advertisements about “social issues, elections, or politics in the US.” The intention was to prevent Facebook from being overwhelmed by a blitz of last-minute ads that would require fact-checking, and to limit the ability of political groups to sow confusion or violence. Advertisers were not blocked from running old ads, however: Facebook’s rules meant they could continue to run already-approved political ads through to the end of Election Day, after which they were all removed. 

We already know that turnout was historically high across both Democrats and Republican voters. Though it looks as if Joe Biden will receive the highest number of votes for any presidential candidate in history, Donald Trump is on track to receive the second-highest number. Republican competitiveness in the face of such high turnout was a surprise to many, and not always reflected in polls taken … Read the rest

Back in 2016, I could count on one hand the kinds of interventions that technology companies were willing to use to rid their platforms of misinformation, hate speech, and harassment. Over the years, crude mechanisms like blocking content and banning accounts have morphed into a more complex set of tools, including quarantining topics, removing posts from search, barring recommendations, and down-ranking posts in priority. 

And yet, even with more options at their disposal, misinformation remains a serious problem. There was a great deal of coverage about misinformation on Election Day—my colleague Emily Drefyuss found, for example, that when Twitter tried to deal with content using the hashtag #BidenCrimeFamily, with tactics including “de-indexing” by blocking search results, users including Donald Trump adapted by using variants of the same tag. But we still don’t know much about how Twitter decided to do those things in the first place, or how it … Read the rest