Social media companies in the United States are offering few details about their plans to safeguard the midterm elections in November.
Social media companies in the United States are offering few details as they share their plans to safeguard the midterm elections in November.
Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are generally staying the course heading into the 2020 election, when conspiracy theories proliferated to the point that they culminated in the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The video app TikTok, whose popularity has skyrocketed since the last election cycle and has become the new hub of disinformation, announced Wednesday that it will launch a program to help people find polling places and information about candidates. .
The information will appear in videos about the elections and in the threads of users searching for hashtags related to the process. TikTok will also work with voter support groups to provide specialized information to college students, the deaf, the military abroad and people with criminal histories.
TikTok, like other platforms, did not provide details on the number of full-time employees or how much money it will spend on efforts to promote accurate information and combat misinformation.
The company said it is working with more than a dozen fact-checking organizations, including US-based PolitiFact and Lead Stories, to debunk misinformation. The company declined to say how many videos have been verified on its network. He said he will use a combination of people and artificial intelligence to detect and remove threats against poll workers, as well as disinformation.
TikTok also said it is monitoring for influencers who violate its rules by accepting money off the platform to promote political issues or candidates, an issue that came to light during the 2020 election, said Eric Han, the platform’s chief security officer. . The company is trying to educate creators and agencies about its rules, which include a ban on political ads.
“With the work that we do, there is no end goal,” Han said.
Meta Platforms Inc., the parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced Tuesday that its approach for this election cycle is “largely consistent with the policies and safeguards” of 2020.
“As we did in 2020, we have a team dedicated to combating election interference while helping people receive reliable information on when and where to vote,” Nick Clegg, president of global affairs for Meta, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. Tuesday.
Meta declined to say how many people it has dedicated to its elections team responsible for monitoring the midterm elections, limiting itself to indicating that it has “hundreds of people in more than 40 teams.”