As hundreds of advertisers boycott the the social media monolith over its divisive content, a political blackout may be coming in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. Political ads on Facebook have long proven a lightning rod for controversy. They’re all too easy to pack with misinformation , while removing misleading ads is its own separate ordeal. Experts such as professor and digital rights advocate David Carroll have long suggested banning microtargeted political ads from Facebook, following the Cambridge Analytica fiasco from the 2016 election . Read Full Story

Twitter is following Facebook’s lead with a crackdown on vaccine misinformation. Twitter is taking another step to curb misinformation on its platform. Read Full Story

An analysis found a handful of advertisements featuring lies about mail-in voting that violate Facebook’s policies about election misinformation. This story was produced by MapLight , a nonprofit organization that reveals the influence of money in politics, and published in partnership with Fast Company . Read Full Story

Facebook is now deploying notifications to directly tell people when they have engaged with misinformation. But experts say it may be too little, too late. Facebook is changing how it reaches people who have encountered misinformation on its platform. The company will now send notifications to anyone who has liked, commented, or shared a piece of misinformation that’s been taken down for violating the platform’s terms of service. It will then connect users with trustworthy sources in effort to correct the record. While researchers think the additional context could help people better understand their news consumption habits, it may be too little, too late to quell the tide of COVID-19 misinformation. Read Full Story

The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but that doesn’t mean the major platforms have to guarantee bad actors freedom of reach. Approaching the U.S. presidential election, social media platforms have been feverishly introducing new measures to curb disinformation. Twitter announced the suspension of all political advertising, the addition of warning labels on tweets containing misleading information and their deamplification, and limits to how users can retweet. Facebook also announced the suspension of political advertising (though much later). In September it started taking down and labeling posts that tried to dissuade people from voting. Both platforms have started aggressively banning QAnon. They have also removed or labeled some posts by President Trump containing false information and declared that they would take down any content attempting to wrongly claim election victory. YouTube, despite being a key platform of misinformation, has remained fairly quiet. Read Full Story

As Facebook struggles with waves of misinformation, the company’s political and business concerns are influencing its fact-checking policies. When Mark Zuckerberg went to Washington for a rare, three-day charm tour last September, his schedule featured behind-closed-doors lunches, dinner with President Trump and Peter Thiel, and one-on-ones with lawmakers who, among other things, wanted to talk about a video on Facebook. Read Full Story

You might have never heard of Ueno, but it’s the first design studio that Twitter has ever acquired. For years, Twitter has faced criticism for enabling harassment and the spread of misinformation and, in recent months, the company has shown signs of trying to right its course. With an important election in balance, the company banned political ads, flagged Donald Trump’s tweets as disputed, and used its interface to nudge people to read and comment on stories before retweeting them. Last week, it banned Trump from its platform outright . Read Full Story

We asked major social networks including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter how they’ll fight fake news and other attempts to undermine election integrity this year. Here’s how they measure up. When misinformation spread across Facebook and other social networks during the 2016 U.S. election season, none of them were prepared. Read Full Story

Tech companies should stop forcing politicians to vie for their algorithms’ attention, writes political digital strategist Eric Wilson. Instead, they should rethink their platform’s incentives—and follow the example of the USPS. As major tech companies struggle with their responsibilities to the users and communities they serve, the question of what political candidates should be allowed to say in their online postings has emerged as a flash point. Each of the various platforms have taken different approaches to this question, but they each ignore the most important consideration of all: Why is it more advantageous online for a political candidate to be sensational rather than measured? Read Full Story

After deploying in the U.K. and India, Logically is launching a browser extension and app in the United States with a goal of beating back the overwhelming tide of misinformation before the November election. In late April, an investigation by The Guardian tied widespread 5G and coronavirus conspiracy theories to an an evangelical pastor in England . Read Full Story