Twitter did announce that it redesigned labels to hinder further interactions and facilitate clicks for additional information.Īs the fastest-growing social media platform, TikTok has two notable characteristics: Its predominantly young adult user base regularly consumes news on the platform, and its short videos often come with attention-grabbing images and sounds. Among tweets that shared the same link to misinformation, only a minority displayed these warnings, suggesting that the process of putting warnings on misinformation is not automatic, uniform or efficient. Fewer than 3% of these tweets were presented with warning labels or pop-up boxes. This pattern seems to have continued as over 300,000 Tweets-excluding retweets-included links that were flagged as false after fact checks between April 2019 and February 2021. In fact, shares of misinformation on Twitter increased from about 3 million per month during the 2016 presidential election to about 5 million per month in July 2018. While Twitter has generally not been treated as the biggest culprit of misinformation since 2016, it is unclear if its misinformation measures are sufficient. Also, Chinese state-run Facebook accounts have been spreading misinformation about the war in Ukraine in English to their hundreds of millions of followers. As of November 2021, 31 of them were still active. In April 2020, fact-checkers notified Facebook about 59 accounts that spread misinformation about COVID-19. More recent evidence shows that Facebook’s approach still needs work when it comes to managing accounts that spread misinformation, flagging misinformation posts and reducing the reach of those accounts and posts. Although engagement-likes, shares and comments-with misinformation on Facebook peaked with 160 million per month during the 2016 presidential election, the level in July 2018, 60 million per month, was still at high levels. Major social media platforms may need to coordinate efforts to combat misinformation.įacebook was largely blamed for its failure to combat misinformation during the 2016 presidential election campaign. One company’s intervention may backfire and promote cross-platform diffusion of misinformation. One important consideration: Users are not constrained to using just one platform. midterm elections, but experts noted that they are not very different from their 2020 plans. Major social media platforms announced plans for dealing with misinformation in the 2022 U.S. Social media are important sources of news for most Americans in 2022, but they also could be a fertile ground for spreading misinformation. 2022 is looking like 2020ĭam Hee Kim, Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Arizona We asked experts on social media to grade how ready Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube are to handle the task. Social media companies have announced plans to deal with misinformation in the 2022 midterm elections, but the companies vary in their approaches and effectiveness. The big lie about the 2020 presidential election has become a major theme, and immigrant communities are increasingly in the crosshairs of disinformation campaigns-deliberate efforts to spread misinformation. However, the nature of the threat misinformation poses to society continues to shift in form and targets. With two more election cycles rife with misinformation under their belts, social media companies have experience identifying and countering misinformation. election was a wake-up call about the dangers of political misinformation on social media. The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
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