(PresidentialHill.com)- On Thursday, several rights groups issued warnings to social media companies that they have to act fast to stop the spread of disinformation as the midterm elections approach.
A coalition of more than 100 rights groups, led by Common Cause, said that social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook all must work to combat election disinformation, which still includes the “Big Lie” being perpetuated by former President Donald Trump and his supporters.
In a letter the coalition sent to executives of the social media companies this week, they said the companies didn’t initiate any policies that would’ve fought disinformation during the 2020 presidential election.
They said that, in part, led to more disinformation that convinced people to attend the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021, with many of those people then marching to and attacking the U.S. Capitol building.
The letter reads:
“High-profile disinformation spreaders and other bad actors are continuing to use social media platforms to disseminate messages that undermine trust in elections. Candidates are using the Big Lie as a platform plank to pre-emptively declare voter fraud in order to dispute the results of the 2022 election.
“This is damaging American democracy by undermining faith in the integrity of our elections.”
The groups that sent the letter sent copies to the chief executive officers of Snap Inc., Instagram LLC and Google. In it, they urged them to take decisive action to prevent this from happening. One thing they said should be a priority if fact checking by providing access to data in real-time to various watchdog groups and researchers.
The letter continued that the companies have to give priority to combating Trump’s “Big Lie” that Trump and his supporters continue to harp on after he lost the White House back in 2020.
The activist groups also suggested that the social media platforms provide improved transparency for all political advertisements on their sites, as well as on their practices for enforcement and thee algorithmic models that they use to run things that are powered by computer learning or artificial intelligence.
Some of the other groups that signed onto the letter include the Arab American Institute, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Greenpeace, the League of Women Voters and the Center for American Progress.
There has been no official word from any of the social media platforms or other big tech companies about how they plan to combat misinformation leading up to the extremely important 2022 midterm elections.
Some people say that more needs to be done, while others say there’s nothing wrong at all with what’s being posted to their sites.
No matter what side of the political spectrum you’re on, one thing is clear — that these social media platforms need to apply their rules and algorithms equally to all users, no matter what the message is or who it’s coming from.
