BREAKING: Trump just officially filed to run for president again – and now, Facebook is telling its team to no longer fact-check anything he says. [1]

John, I don’t need to tell you how dangerous this is. The last time Trump’s election lies were left unchecked on social media, extremists launched the deadly January 6th attack on our Capitol and tried to overturn our election results: the very thing that led Meta to ban his account.

Now, with Facebook considering unbanning Trump as soon as January, they’ve decided to let his election lies run rampant.

It’s unacceptable: social media platforms like Facebook have an obligation to their users to moderate the content on their site, ban accounts that don’t follow their policies, and combat election lies. Sign our petition to demand Mark Zuckerberg and other social media CEOs enforce their own content policies.

ADD YOUR NAME

1) https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/15/politics/trump-2024-presidential-bid/index.html
2) https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/15/politics/facebook-fact-check-donald-trump/index.html

P.S. To learn more about Common Cause's efforts to ensure a free, fair, and accessible election in 2024 – including our work to protect voters at the polls, stop anti-democracy legislation, and push back on election-denying disinformation – read our latest Democracy Wire Post >>

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John, here’s one thing we learned on Tuesday: social media platforms are woefully unprepared to stop election deniers and disinformation.

Elon Musk’s Twitter is the perfect example – one of his first moves upon taking control was to fire the head of legal, policy and trust signaling a free pass for anyone who wants to spread election disinformation, transphobia, homophobia, racism, and more. [1] Since then, Twitter’s civic integrity team has essentially been gutted, with the Head of Trust and Safety resigning and Musk laying off thousands of content moderators. [2]

We’ve even learned that Twitter has stopped enforcement around the ‘Big Lie’ – even though rampant election denialism on sites like Twitter fed the violence that culminated in the January 6th attack on our democracy. [3]

We need to take election disinformation seriously – and platforms like Twitter, Meta, and Tiktok have an obligation to their users to moderate their content. Tell social media platforms to enforce and strengthen their policies against disinformation.

Musk even launched a program that lets any user buy verification – creating mass confusion about what sources are official and whose accounts can be trusted. And the initial plan to roll this feature out the day before midterm elections makes it clear that combating election disinformation is far from a priority. Even Twitter’s top privacy and security officers have resigned, creating uncertainty over whether the platform will comply with federal requirements to protect user privacy. [4]

It doesn’t end with Twitter. Our Social Media Monitoring team spent Election Day tracking blatant, evidence-free attempts to convince people their votes don’t count or that we can’t trust election officials – and raises them to social media platform officials to delete.

But this year, the response we received was haphazard to say the least. Companies like Meta, Twitter, and TikTok failed to learn from the 2020 elections. We, along with 120 other groups, called on them months ago to make specific policy changes to prevent this, but they didn’t, allowing harmful content to continue to spread – to say nothing of right-wing sites like Gab and Parler that are designed to spread disinformation. [5]

This is dangerous for democracy – especially on platforms like Twitter, which reported that 55% of their users get their news from Twitter over other sites. [6]

Tell social media platforms: we need them to stand up against election disinformation, hate speech, harassment, and other harmful content.

John, we can’t stand by while platforms like Twitter are overrun with extremists and lies. I hope you’ll join me today in calling on major social media platforms to enforce their content moderation policies.

Thanks for all you do,

Yosef Getachew, Media & Democracy Program Manager
and the team at Common Cause

1. https://fortune.com/2022/10/29/musk-twitter-content-moderation-policing-hate-speech/

2. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-fires-thousands-outsourced-093626924.html

3. https://www.commoncause.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Disinfo_WhitePaperv3.pdf

4. https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/15/twitter-elon-musk-acting-dpo/

5. https://www.commoncause.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Coalition-letter-for-2022-mid-terms-1.pdf

6. https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/insights/2022/how-many-people-come-twitter-for-news

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