An umbrella organization of civil rights groups is alerting the public to “digital voting disinformation” and imploring social media companies to take action.
“There is still time for social media companies to step up and do what is right,” Maya Wiley, the president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said in a statement Monday.
Wiley’s coalition, representing more than 200 civil rights interest groups and other organizations, wants companies like Elon Musk’s X and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta to more clearly separate fact from fiction.
“Social media companies should be vigilant,” Wiley said, observing that information platforms don’t have to be overwhelmingly polluted. “We have the power to and ability to balance free speech rights with verification, links, labeling and ensuring algorithms demote rather than promote dangerous disinformation.”
Social media firms, however, have taken a relatively laissez-faire approach to viral lies and propaganda in recent years. Some earlier efforts to support verified news sources and discourage unverified vitriol have been scuttled in the United States, in part due to pressure campaigns from conservatives who have conflated all discussions of disinformation as pleas for censorship.
Musk has ridiculed people who care about the spread of digital disinformation and suggested that they, not the bad faith actors who lie for profit or political gain, are the real problem. Musk is also campaigning for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Zuckerberg has told Republican lawmakers that his goal vis-à-vis the 2024 election “is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role.”
But some media literacy experts have argued that a neutral stance favors those who poison the public discourse. The Leadership Conference’s Center for Civil Rights and Technology decided to speak out after social networks were swamped with lies about Hurricanes Helene and Milton earlier this fall.
“The amount of false information that spread online during the hurricanes was staggering — but not unsurprising,” Koustubh “K.J.” Bagchi, a vice president at the center, said. “Unfortunately, platforms are no longer enforcing the barebones guidelines around content moderation they themselves imposed.”
On Monday, the center is publicly calling on social media companies to “establish and enforce civic and elections policies, address AI-generated and manipulated media, resource election teams to protect against voting disinformation, limit rampant resharing of voting disinformation (i.e., rate limits, remove share buttons) and amplify authoritative and truthful information on voting” and the election.
The conduct of social media firms is of interest to civil rights groups; candidates and campaigns; government agencies; and election technology suppliers, just to name a few.
Last week,?Musk?peddled several debunked claims?about the 2020 election, including some false claims about Dominion Voting Systems, the same company that dragged Fox News into court and reached a $787.5 million settlement over defamation claims.
Dominion responded with a detailed fact-check of Musk that noted “these are not matters of opinion,” they are “verifiable facts.”
The Center for Civil Rights and Technology compiled a list of expected harms relating to the election, including “false information about the security of ballots, dropboxes, and vote-by-mail,” like the kind Musk has already promoted; “preemptive and false accusations of voter fraud;” AI-generated lies “designed to outrage or cast doubts on the process;” and “claims of false or incorrect results.”
