Mr. Reynolds disputed that 60 people were focused on the integrity of elections. He said Meta had hundreds of people across more than 40 teams focused on election work. With each election, he said, the company is “building teams and technologies and developing partnerships to take down manipulation campaigns, limit the spread of misinformation and maintain industry-leading transparency around political ads and pages.”
Trenton Kennedy, a Twitter spokesman, said the company was continuing “our efforts to protect the integrity of election conversation and keep the public informed on our approach.” For the midterms, Twitter has labeled the accounts of political candidates and provided information boxes on how to vote in local elections.
How Meta and Twitter treat elections has implications beyond the United States, given the global nature of their platforms. In Brazil, which is holding a general election in October, President Jair Bolsonaro has recently raised doubts about the country’s electoral process. Latvia, Bosnia and Slovenia are also holding elections in October.
“People in the U.S. are almost certainly getting the Rolls-Royce treatment when it comes to any integrity on any platform, especially for U.S. elections,” said Sahar Massachi, the executive director of the think tank Integrity Institute and a former Facebook employee. “And so however bad it is here, think about how much worse it is everywhere else.”
Facebook’s role in potentially distorting elections became evident after 2016, when Russian operatives used the site to spread inflammatory content and divide American voters in the U.S. presidential election. In 2018, Mr. Zuckerberg testified before Congress that election security was his top priority.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/technology/mark-zuckerberg-meta-midterm-elections.html
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