Critics urge tech giants to do more for 2022

Social media platforms’ plans to tackle election-related misinformation will be put to the test as congressional candidates ramp up online activity in the final months of midterm campaigns.

• Since the 2020 election, mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook have been more liberal in applying measures to block, label and remove politicians — including their watershed decisions to suspend former President Trump’s accounts last year.
• But as more politicians test the boundaries of the platforms’ rules with incendiary posts, especially after an uptick in violent rhetoric following last week’s FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, critics warn that tech companies need to do more than dust off their 2020 playbooks to follow through on their commitments to block misinformation and hate speech.

New York University researcher Laura Edelson said to get at the core of the issue, platforms need to reassess the algorithms recommending content to users.

She compared taking content down after amplifying it to a wide online audience — the approach most platforms use, and plan to use ahead of November based on their public posts — to creating a car with no brakes and only airbags.

“By the time those are useful, the car’s crashed,” she said.