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“To imply that Meta has abandoned its election integrity efforts is absurd and irresponsible as it ignores our work: we have around 40,000 people globally working on safety and security—more than we had in 2020, have grown our fact checking program to more than 100 independent partners, taken down over 200 covert coordinated influence operations, and removed more than a thousand banned militia organizations,” Meta spokesperson Erica Sackin tells WIRED.
Not only are these big tech CEOs revising their moderation policies to allow more trash to find an audience, Trump has recently said that many of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest tech executives have called to suck up to him.
“Social media platforms have by and large stopped moderating such content and just as worryingly have cut off researcher access to data streams that allowed us to objectively report on the scale of these campaigns, all due to political pressure on disinformation researchers and social media platforms,” Nina Jankowicz, the Biden administration’s former disinformation czar, told my colleague David Gilbert this week when he wrote about election conspiracy theories and falsehoods already spread unchecked online. Far-right agitators are laying the groundwork for violence and election denial. Fears over noncitizens voting may have led to eligible voters being removed from Virginia’s voter rolls.
“The work of studying election delegitimization and supporting election officials is more important than ever. It is crucial that we not only stand resolute but speak out forcefully against intimidation tactics intended to silence us and discredit academic research,” Renee DiResta, former director of the Stanford program, wrote in The New York Times in June.
Under the Biden administration, the Democrats fashioned themselves a bastion for deplatforming online bullshit. While a majority of election lies are spread by far-right influencers and activists, the Democrats are beginning to take their role less seriously as well. The Harris campaign rewrote news headlines and ran them as ads on Google, deceptively edited TikTok content, and spent $11 million on a Facebook page to boost positive coverage of the campaign. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em I guess.
If you thought 2020 was bad, all of these decisions have led to an internet that’s worse off than in prior elections. The same bad actors are using the same playbook as before, but the tools to address it have disappeared.
The Chatroom
After a winner is declared, if that’s next week or months into the future, the next big question will be who will accept the results of the election. WIRED reached out to every senator and member of the US Congress asking if they would accept the final election results as called by the Associated Press (AP).
Have your representatives agreed to certify the election come January? Click this link to open our tool. There, you can look up your zip code or state with our search bar to find your representatives and their responses to our question of whether they will accept the AP’s results.
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