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    TechScape: As the US election campaign heats up, so could the market for misinformation

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    X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, announced it will allow political advertising back on the platform – reversing a global ban on political ads since 2019. The move is the latest to stoke concerns about the ability of big tech to police online misinformation ahead of the 2024 elections – and X is not the only platform being scrutinised.Social media firms’ handlings of misinformation and divisive speech reached a breaking point in the 2020 US presidential elections when Donald Trump used online platforms to rile up his base, culminating in the storming of the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. But in the time since, companies have not strengthened their policies to prevent such crises, instead slowly stripping protections away. This erosion of safeguards, coupled with the rise of artificial intelligence, could create a perfect storm for 2024, experts warn.As the election cycle heats up, Twitter’s move this week is not the first to raise major concerns about the online landscape for 2024 – and it won’t be the last.Musk’s free speech fantasyTwitter’s change to election advertising policies is hardly surprising to those following the platform’s evolution under the leadership of Elon Musk, who purchased the company in 2022. In the months since his takeover, the erratic billionaire has made a number of unilateral changes to the site – not least of all the rebrand of Twitter to X.Many of these changes have centered on Musk’s goal to make Twitter profitable at all costs. The platform, he complained, was losing $4m per day at the time of his takeover, and he stated in July that its cash flow was still in the negative. More than half of the platform’s top advertisers have fled since the takeover – roughly 70% of the platforms leading advertisers were not spending there as of last December. For his part, this week Musk threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League, saying, “based on what we’ve heard from advertisers, ADL seems to be responsible for most of our revenue loss”. Whatever the reason, his decision to re-allow political advertisers could help boost revenue at a time when X sorely needs it.But it’s not just about money. Musk has identified himself as a “free speech absolutist” and seems hell bent on turning the platform into a social media free-for-all. Shortly after taking the helm of Twitter, he lifted bans on the accounts of Trump and other rightwing super-spreaders of misinformation. Ahead of the elections, he has expressed a goal of turning Twitter into “digital town square” where voters and candidates can discuss politics and policies – solidified recently by its (disastrous) hosting of Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s campaign announcement.Misinformation experts and civil rights advocates have said this could spell disaster for future elections. “Elon Musk is using his absolute control over Twitter to exert dangerous influence over the 2024 election,” said Imran Ahmed, head of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a disinformation and hate speech watchdog that Musk himself has targeted in recent weeks.In addition to the policy changes, experts warn that the massive workforce reduction Twitter has carried out under Musk could impact the ability to deal with misinformation, as trust and safety teams are now reported to be woefully understaffed.Let the misinformation wars beginWhile Musk’s decisions have been the most high profile in recent weeks, it is not the only platform whose policies have raised alarm. In June, YouTube reversed its election integrity policy, now allowing content contesting the validity of the 2020 elections to remain on the platform. Meanwhile, Meta has also reinstated accounts of high-profile spreaders of misinformation, including Donald Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr.Experts say these reversals could create an environment similar to that which fundamentally threatened democracy in 2020. But now there is an added risk: the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence tools. Generative AI, which has increased its capabilities in the last year, could streamline the ability to manipulate the public on a massive scale.Meta has a longstanding policy that exempts political ads from its misinformation policies and has declined to state whether that immunity will extend to manipulated and AI-generated images in the upcoming elections. Civil rights watchdogs have envisioned a worst-case scenario in which voters’ feeds are flooded with deceptively altered and fabricated images of political figures, eroding their ability to trust what they read online and chipping away at the foundations of democracy.While Twitter is not the only company rolling back its protections against misinformation, its extreme stances are moving the goalposts for the entire industry. The Washington Post reported this week that Meta was considering banning all political advertising on Facebook, but reversed course to better compete with its rival Twitter, which Musk had promised to transform into a haven for free speech. Meta also dissolved its Facebook Journalism Project, tasked with promoting accurate information online, and its “responsible innovation team,” which monitored the company’s products for potential risks, according to the Washington Post.Twitter may be the most scrutinised in recent weeks, but it’s clear that almost all platforms are moving towards an environment in which they throw up their hands and say they cannot or will not police dangerous misinformation online – and that should concern us all.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe wider TechScape David Shariatmadari goes deep with the co-founder of DeepMind about the mind-blowing potential of artificial intelligence in biotech in this long read. New tech news site 404 Media has published a distressing investigation into AI-generated mushroom-foraging books on Amazon. In a space where misinformation could mean the difference between eating something delicious and something deadly, the stakes are high. If you can’t beat them, join them: celebrities have been quietly working to sign deals licensing their artificially generated likenesses as the AI arms race continues. Elsewhere in AI – scammers are on the rise, and their tactics are terrifying. And the Guardian has blocked OpenAI from trawling its content. Can you be “shadowbanned” on a dating app? Some users are convinced their profiles are not being prioritised in the feed. A look into this very modern anxiety, and how the algorithms of online dating actually work. More

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      YouTube reinstates Trump’s account after suspension over US Capitol attack

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      YouTube said on Friday it was lifting restrictions on Donald Trump’s official account which were imposed after the violent January 6 attack on Congress.Leslie Miller, vice-president of public policy, told Axios Trump’s “ability to upload new content is restored”.Miller said YouTube had “carefully evaluated the continued risk of real-world violence, balancing that with the importance of preserving the opportunity for voters to hear equally from major national candidates in the run up to an election.“This channel will continue to be subject to our policies, just like any other channel on YouTube.”Trump videos YouTube deemed to incite violence would not be reinstated, Axios reported.Twitter and Facebook have already lifted bans imposed in the aftermath of the Capitol riot. Trump has not returned to either, preferring his own platform, Truth Social.Trump will now be able to buy campaign ads on YouTube.The insurrection Trump incited on 6 January 2021, in an attempt to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden, is now linked to nine deaths.More than a thousand arrests have been made and hundreds of convictions secured. Authorities have reportedly indicated more arrests to come.Trump was impeached but acquitted in his Senate trial when enough Republicans stayed loyal.Running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, he enjoys clear leads in polling.He also faces civil and criminal legal jeopardy over the Capitol attack, other election subversion efforts, his retention of classified material, a hush money payment to a porn star, his financial affairs and a defamation trial arising from an allegation of rape.Trump denies all wrongdoing.He has also recorded a charity single in aid of imprisoned January 6 rioters.Twitter and Facebook have already lifted bans imposed in the aftermath of the Capitol riot. Trump returned to Facebook on Friday afternoon with a brief video clip for his 2024 presidential run with “I’M BACK” as the caption. He has not returned to Twitter, preferring his own platform, Truth Social.Jenna Ellis, a lawyer who worked on Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, referred to the new owner of Twitter, who lifted that platform’s Trump ban in November, when she said of Trump’s YouTube return: “You have to wonder whether this would have ever happened without Elon Musk.” More

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      in World Politics

      The Right to Fair Recollection

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      in US Politics

      Sandy Hook review: anatomy of an American tragedy – and the obscenity of social media

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      Sandy Hook review: anatomy of an American tragedy – and the obscenity of social media Elizabeth Williamson’s book on the 2012 elementary school shooting is a near-unbearable, necessary indictment of Facebook, YouTube and the conspiracy theories they spreadEven in a country now completely inured to the horrors of mass shootings, the massacre at Sandy Hook remains lodged in the minds of everyone old enough to remember it. Ten years ago, 20-year-old Adam Lanza fired 154 rounds from an AR-15-style rifle in less than five minutes. Twenty extremely young children and six adults were killed.Sandy Hook’s tragic legacy: seven years on, a loving father is the latest victimRead moreIt was the worst elementary school shooting in American history.Elizabeth Williamson’s new book is about that “American Tragedy”, but more importantly it is about “the Battle for Truth” that followed. In excruciating detail, Williamson describes the unimaginable double tragedy every Sandy Hook parent has had to endure: the murder of their child, followed by years and years of an army of online monsters accusing them of inventing this unimaginable horror.Alex Jones of Infowars is the best-known villain of this ghastly narrative. His Facebook pages and YouTube channels convinced millions of fools the massacre was either some kind of government plot to encourage a push for gun control or, even more obscenely, that it was all carried out by actors and no one was killed at all.While a single deranged shooter was responsible for the original tragedy, Williamson makes clear she believes Facebook and Google (the owner of YouTube) deserve most of the blame for the subsequent horror the relatives of victims have endured.As Congressman Ro Khanna reported in his new book, Dignity in a Digital Age, an internal Facebook document estimated that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendations”.Those recommendations are the result of the infernal algorithms which are at the heart of the business models of Facebook and YouTube and are probably more responsible for the breakdown in civil society in the US and the world than anything else invented.“We thought the internet would give us this accelerated society of science and information,” says Lenny Pozner, whose son Noah was one of the Sandy Hook victims. But “really, we’ve gone back to flat earth”.It horrified Pozner “to see the image of his son, smiling in his bomber jacket, passed round by an online mob attacking Noah as a fake, a body double, a boy who never lived”. Relentless algorithms pushed those “human lies to the top” on an internet which has become an “all-powerful booster of outrage and denial”.Noah’s mother, Veronique De la Rosa, was another victim of Jones’s persistent, outrageous lies.“It’s like you’ve entered the ninth circle of hell,” she tells Williamson. “Never even in your wildest, most fear-fueled fantasies would you have guessed you’d find yourself having to fight not only through your grief, which you know is at times paralyzing, but to even prove that your son existed.”Lenny Pozner regularly saw his dead son described as an “alleged victim”, but it took years before Facebook and YouTube and Twitter took substantial action to quiet the insane conspiracies their own algorithms had done so much to reinforce.Facebook allowed a Sandy Hook Hoax group and dozens of others to operate virtually uninterrupted for two years. Hundreds of videos on YouTube, owned by Google, wallowed in the hoax, drawing thousands who made threats against the families.“Facebook and Twitter are monsters,” says Pozner. “Out-of-control beasts run like mom-and-pop shops.”Facebook “focuses on growth, to the exclusion of most everything else”, Williamson writes. The algorithms are designed to keep all of us on the platform as long as possible, and they operate “with relentless, sometimes murderous neutrality, rewarding whatever horrible behavior and false or inflammatory content captures and retains users”.In 2018, an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg by Pozner and De La Rosa, published in the Guardian, accused the Facebook chief of “allowing your platform to continue to be used as an instrument to disseminate hate”.Two days later, Facebook finally suspended Jones’s personal page but “took no action against Infowars’ account, which had 1.7 million followers”. YouTube removed four videos from Infowars’ channel and banned Jones from live-streaming for all of 90 days.An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg from the parents of a Sandy Hook victimRead moreHarry Farid heads the school of Information at the University of California Berkeley. He describes the perfect storm which is threatening democracy and civility everywhere: “You have bad people and trolls and people trying to make money by taking advantage of horrible things … you have social media websites who are not only welcoming and permissive of it but are promoting it, and then you have us, the unsuspecting public.”Williamson makes the important and usually forgotten point that nothing in the first amendment gives anyone the right to use a social media platform. All it says on this subject is that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”As Farid points out, platforms have an absolute right to ban all forms of content “without running afoul of the constitution” – which is why Donald Trump had no judicial recourse when he was banned from Facebook and Twitter after the Capitol riot.But most of the time, Farid says, the platforms just look the other way: “Because they’re making so much goddamned money.”Last fall, the California Democrat Adam Schiff told the Guardian the blockbuster testimony of the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen would finally be enough to spur Congress to regulate the worst excesses of the big platforms. So far, their lobbyists have prevented such action. On Saturday, the Guardian asked Schiff if he still believed Congress might act in this session. “There is still a chance,” he wrote in an e-mail, adding that “the degree of Russian propaganda on social media attempting to justify their bloody invasion of Ukraine” might finally provide the “impetus” needed for change.
      Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for the Truth is published in the US by Dutton Books
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      in US Politics

      YouTube suspends Rand Paul for video claiming masks ‘don’t prevent infection’

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      YouTubeYouTube suspends Rand Paul for video claiming masks ‘don’t prevent infection’Video platform suspends Republican senator, in latest move against a public figure who has spread Covid disinformation Maya YangWed 11 Aug 2021 13.26 EDTLast modified on Wed 11 Aug 2021 15.04 EDTYouTube suspended Republican senator Rand Paul on Tuesday for seven days over a video claiming that masks are ineffective against Covid-19.It is the latest move against a prominent public figure who has spread disinformation about ways to protect against the virus or about the vaccines developed to fight it.“We removed content from Senator Paul’s channel for including claims that masks are ineffective in preventing the contraction or transmission of Covid-19, in accordance with our Covid-19 medical misinformation policies,” a YouTube spokesperson said. “This resulted in a first strike on the channel, which means it can’t upload content for a week, per our longstanding three strikes policy,” the spokesperson added.In the removed video, Paul cast doubt on the effectiveness of masks, saying, “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work. They don’t prevent infection,” before adding, “Trying to shape human behavior isn’t the same as following the actual science, which tells us that cloth masks don’t work.”Many public health experts have advised using masks, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) first recommended the public wear cloth masks in April 2020. More recently the CDC advised vaccinated people to wear masks indoors in Delta surge areas.Last month Paul clashed with Dr Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease expert, during a heated discussion about the virus. At one point Fauci said, “Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly.”Responding to the YouTube ban, the Republican senator said on Twitter: “A badge of honor … leftwing cretins at Youtube banning me for 7 days for a video that quotes 2 peer reviewed articles saying cloth masks don’t work.”Last week, YouTube removed a Newsmax interview with Paul in which he said that “there’s no value” in wearing masks.Paul’s current strike will be lifted from his account after 90 days if there are no more violations. A second strike within the 90 days will result in a two-week suspension, followed by a permanent ban if his account accrues a third strike.YouTube’s suspension of Paul’s account was issued a day after Twitter suspended Republican Senator Marjorie Taylor Greene’s account for one week for violating the platform’s Covid-19 misinformation rules.TopicsYouTubeRand PaulCoronavirusUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      Facebook to suspend Trump’s account for two years

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      Facebook is suspending Donald Trump’s account for two years, the company has announced in a highly anticipated decision that follows months of debate over the former president’s future on social media.“Given the gravity of the circumstances that led to Mr Trump’s suspension, we believe his actions constituted a severe violation of our rules which merit the highest penalty available under the new enforcement protocols. We are suspending his accounts for two years, effective from the date of the initial suspension on January 7 this year,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs, said in a statement on Friday.At the end of the suspension period, Facebook said, it would work with experts to assess the risk to public safety posed by reinstating Trump’s account. “We will evaluate external factors, including instances of violence, restrictions on peaceful assembly and other markers of civil unrest,” Clegg wrote. “If we determine that there is still a serious risk to public safety, we will extend the restriction for a set period of time and continue to re-evaluate until that risk has receded.”He added that once the suspension was lifted, “a strict set of rapidly escalating sanctions” would be triggered if Trump violated Facebook policies.Friday’s decision comes just weeks after input from the Facebook oversight board – an independent advisory committee of academics, media figures and former politicians – who recommended in early May that Trump’s account not be reinstated.However the oversight board punted the ultimate decision on Trump’s fate back to Facebook itself, giving the company six months to make the final call. The board said that Facebook’s “indeterminate and standardless penalty of indefinite suspension” for Trump was “not appropriate”, criticism that Clegg wrote the company “absolutely accept[s]”.The new policy allows for escalating penalties of suspensions for one month, six months, one year, and two years.The former president has been suspended since January, following the deadly Capitol attack that saw a mob of Trump supporters storm Congress in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The company suspended Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts over posts in which he appeared to praise the actions of the rioters, saying that his actions posed too great a risk to remain on the platform.Following the Capitol riot, Trump was suspended from several major tech platforms, including Twitter, YouTube and Snapchat. Twitter has since made its ban permanent.The former president called Facebook’s decision “an insult to the record-setting 75m people, plus many others, who voted for us in the 2020 Rigged Presidential Election,” in a statement. “They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this censoring and silencing, and ultimately, we will win.” Trump received fewer than 75m votes in the 2020 election, which he lost. He also hinted at a 2024 run.Facebook also announced that it would revoke its policy of treating speech by politicians as inherently newsworthy and exempt from enforcement of its content rules that ban, among other things, hate speech. The decision marks a major reversal of a set of policies that Clegg and Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, once championed as crucial to democracy and free speech.The company first created the newsworthiness exemption to its content rules in 2016, following international outcry over its decision to censor posts including the historic “napalm girl” photograph for violating its ban on nude images of children. The new rule tacitly acknowledged the importance of editorial judgment in Facebook’s censorship decisions.In 2019, at a speech at the Atlantic festival in Washington, Clegg revealed that Facebook had decided to treat all speech by politicians as newsworthy, exempting it from content rules. “Would it be acceptable to society at large to have a private company in effect become a self-appointed referee for everything that politicians say? I don’t believe it would be,” Clegg said at the time.Under the new rules, Clegg wrote Friday, “when we assess content for newsworthiness, we will not treat content posted by politicians any differently from content posted by anyone else”.The newsworthiness exemption is by no means the only policy area in which Facebook treats politicians differently from other users. The company also exempts politicians’ speech from its third-party fact-checking and maintains a list of high-profile accounts that are exempted from the AI systems that Facebook relies on for enforcement of many of its rules.Facebook did not immediately respond to questions about whether those policies remain in effect. More

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      in US Politics

      Mike Lindell’s new free speech network won’t let you use the Lord’s name in vain

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      Mike Lindell, the man best known for his internet pillow company My Pillow, as well as for his fierce allegiance to Donald Trump, is set to launch a new free speech platform this week that he thinks will put YouTube and Twitter out of business. But it turns out it will limit what users can say – by stopping them from, among other things, taking the Lord’s name in vain.“Everyone is going to be able to talk freely,” said Mike Lindell about the platform, called Frank, which is set to roll out on 19 April, in an interview with the conservative host Graham Ledger on the Ledger Report podcast. “When you come over now you are going to be able to speak out and have opinions.”“You don’t get to use the four swear words: the c-word, the n-word, the f-word, or God’s name in vain,” Lindell explained in a video on the Frank landing page.In an attempt to differentiate itself from other “anything goes” conservative-leaning social networking platforms, Lindell, a Christian, has laid out the type of speech his users will not be able to freely use, including profanity, sexual content, and blasphemous language.Lindell, the, let us say, creatively minded political theorist, who was banned from Twitter earlier this year for his persistent lies about how Trump actually won the 2020 election, met with the former president in January apparently urging him to consider martial law to defend that claim, and has recently said he’s hired private investigators to look into why Fox News won’t book him any more, has framed the social media venture as a mix between Twitter and YouTube.“You’re going to have your own like YouTube channel, only that’s your Twitter handle,” he’s said.Oh and, by the way, it will also put both companies out of business he said.Mike Lindell announces that he’ll be unveiling a new social media platform within two weeks that will put both Twitter and YouTube out of business. pic.twitter.com/PsDuBOWd5H— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) March 11, 2021
      He has also, without necessarily explaining how the concept will work, promised users more followers, certainly a unique pitch.“People are going to have more followers,” Lindell told Steve Bannon recently. “Ten times more followers.”In a shocking move, Lindell has admitted that criticism of Trump will be permitted on the site.“Free speech is not pornography. Free speech is not ‘I’m going to kill you’,” said Lindell, who is currently being sued by voting machine manufacturer Dominion for $1.3bn over his own personal free speech about the election. More

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      in Elections

      Rightwing 'super-spreader': study finds handful of accounts spread bulk of election misinformation

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      A handful of rightwing “super-spreaders” on social media were responsible for the bulk of election misinformation in the run-up to the Capitol attack, according to a new study that also sheds light on the staggering reach of falsehoods pushed by Donald Trump.A report from the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a group that includes Stanford and the University of Washington, analyzed social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok during several months before and after the 2020 elections.It found that “super-spreaders” – responsible for the most frequent and most impactful misinformation campaigns – included Trump and his two elder sons, as well as other members of the Trump administration and the rightwing media.The study’s authors and other researchers say the findings underscore the need to disable such accounts to stop the spread of misinformation.“If there is a limit to how much content moderators can tackle, have them focus on reducing harm by eliminating the most effective spreaders of misinformation,” said said Lisa Fazio, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who studies the psychology of fake news but was not involved EIP report. “Rather than trying to enforce the rules equally across all users, focus enforcement on the most powerful accounts.” The report analyzed social media posts featuring words like “election” and “voting” to track key misinformation narratives related to the the 2020 election, including claims of mail carriers throwing away ballots, legitimate ballots strategically not being counted, and other false or unproven stories.The report studied how these narratives developed and the effect they had. It found during this time period, popular rightwing Twitter accounts “transformed one-off stories, sometimes based on honest voter concerns or genuine misunderstandings, into cohesive narratives of systemic election fraud”.Ultimately, the “false claims and narratives coalesced into the meta-narrative of a ‘stolen election’, which later propelled the January 6 insurrection”, the report said.“The 2020 election demonstrated that actors – both foreign and domestic – remain committed to weaponizing viral false and misleading narratives to undermine confidence in the US electoral system and erode Americans’ faith in our democracy,” the authors concluded.Next to no factchecking, with Trump as the super-spreader- in-chiefIn monitoring Twitter, the researchers analyzed more than more than 22 million tweets sent between 15 August and 12 December. The study determined which accounts were most influential by the size and speed with which they spread misinformation.“Influential accounts on the political right rarely engaged in factchecking behavior, and were responsible for the most widely spread incidents of false or misleading information in our dataset,” the report said.Out of the 21 top offenders, 15 were verified Twitter accounts – which are particularly dangerous when it comes to election misinformation, the study said. The “repeat spreaders” responsible for the most widely spread misinformation included Eric Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and influencers like James O’Keefe, Tim Pool, Elijah Riot, and Sidney Powell. All 21 of the top accounts for misinformation leaned rightwing, the study showed.“Top-down mis- and disinformation is dangerous because of the speed at which it can spread,” the report said. “If a social media influencer with millions of followers shares a narrative, it can garner hundreds of thousands of engagements and shares before a social media platform or factchecker has time to review its content.”On nearly all the platforms analyzed in the study – including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – Donald Trump played a massive role.It pinpointed 21 incidents in which a tweet from Trump’s official @realDonaldTrump account jumpstarted the spread of a false narrative across Twitter. For example, Trump’s tweets baselessly claiming that the voting equipment manufacturer Dominion Voting Systems was responsible for election fraud played a large role in amplifying the conspiracy theory to a wider audience. False or baseless tweets sent by Trump’s account – which had 88.9m followers at the time – garnered more than 460,000 retweets.Meanwhile, Trump’s YouTube channel was linked to six distinct waves of misinformation that, combined, were the most viewed of any other repeat-spreader’s videos. His Facebook account had the most engagement of all those studied.The Election Integrity Partnership study is not the first to show the massive influence Trump’s social media accounts have had on the spread of misinformation. In one year – between 1 January 2020 and 6 January 2021 – Donald Trump pushed disinformation in more than 1,400 Facebook posts, a report from Media Matters for America released in February found. Trump was ultimately suspended from the platform in January, and Facebook is debating whether he will ever be allowed back.Specifically, 516 of his posts contained disinformation about Covid-19, 368 contained election disinformation, and 683 contained harmful rhetoric attacking his political enemies. Allegations of election fraud earned over 149.4 million interactions, or an average of 412,000 interactions per post, and accounted for 16% of interactions on his posts in 2020. Trump had a unique ability to amplify news stories that would have otherwise remained contained in smaller outlets and subgroups, said Matt Gertz of Media Matters for America.“What Trump did was take misinformation from the rightwing ecosystem and turn it into a mainstream news event that affected everyone,” he said. “He was able to take these absurd lies and conspiracy theories and turn them into national news. And if you do that, and inflame people often enough, you will end up with what we saw on January 6.”Effects of false election narratives on voters“Super-spreader” accounts were ultimately very successful in undermining voters’ trust in the democratic system, the report found. Citing a poll by the Pew Research Center, the study said that, of the 54% of people who voted in person, approximately half had cited concerns about voting by mail, and only 30% of respondents were “very confident” that absentee or mail-in ballots had been counted as intended.The report outlined a number of recommendations, including removing “super-spreader” accounts entirely.Outside experts agree that tech companies should more closely scrutinize top accounts and repeat offenders.Researchers said the refusal to take action or establish clear rules for when action should be taken helped to fuel the prevalence of misinformation. For example, only YouTube had a publicly stated “three-strike” system for offenses related to the election. Platforms like Facebook reportedly had three-strike rules as well but did not make the system publicly known.Only four of the top 20 Twitter accounts cited as top spreaders were actually removed, the study showed – including Donald Trump’s in January. Twitter has maintained that its ban of the former president is permanent. YouTube’s chief executive officer stated this week that Trump would be reinstated on the platform once the “risk of violence” from his posts passes. Facebook’s independent oversight board is now considering whether to allow Trump to return.“We have seen that he uses his accounts as a way to weaponize disinformation. It has already led to riots at the US Capitol; I don’t know why you would give him the opportunity to do that again,” Gertz said. “It would be a huge mistake to allow Trump to return.” More