Going into the US presidential election four years ago, Facebook and Twitter instituted significant policies to combat misleading political content. Just before Election Day 2020, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company had been working for years to protect “election integrity.”

After the Capitol Hill riots on January 6, 2021, Facebook and Twitter both banned former US President Donald Trump’s social media accounts. However, so far, the accounts have been restored. The two company bosses also chose opposite paths: While Zuckerberg tried to reduce political content on Meta’s platforms, Elon Musk – who bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X – almost refused to moderate content and went all out to support Mr. Trump.

bloomberg us election
Mark Zuckerberg (right) and Elon Musk choose different directions for their platforms in the 2024 US presidential election. Photo: Bloomberg

Over time, the number of human content moderators has also decreased and the job has relied more on AI technology. The only major platform that has taken a more active approach in the 2024 US presidential election is TikTok.

Meanwhile, experts are concerned about social media platforms being abused in ways such as posting misleading information about the voting process, declaring victory before results are known, or running disinformation campaigns to sow doubt about the integrity of election results.

Compared to 2020, the techniques for creating false information have advanced significantly, especially with the advent of generative AI. According to Brian Fishman, former director of counterterrorism policy at Facebook, this is a time when false information is so prevalent that people give up on the truth and turn to their intuition.

A Meta spokesperson said that in recent years, the company has developed a comprehensive approach to help ensure the integrity of elections on the platform.

At X, by contrast, Musk has loosened policies to allow what he once considered abusive behavior to occur. According to Bloomberg , X has done little to coordinate with other companies and the government in identifying manipulated information. Musk has also been one of Trump’s biggest financial backers, openly promoting partisan and untrue political messages.

Musk also dismantled much of the infrastructure Twitter had built to combat political abuse. He scaled back the trust and safety team, rendering some of its tools to combat mass manipulation useless. X’s new boss also undermined those systems by slashing the cloud computing costs needed to keep them running, according to former employees who spoke on condition of anonymity. Some of those decisions resulted in the permanent loss of historical data needed for analysis.

While Musk tries to shape the political landscape, Zuckerberg does his best to stay out of it. He admitted that one of his biggest mistakes in 2020 was going too far in policing political content, and Meta has changed to show less of it. In February, the company announced it would no longer recommend content it deemed political to Instagram and Threads users.

This year, Meta will continue to label some important posts that dispute the election results, but not as extensively as in 2020.

One platform stepping up its defenses is TikTok. The Chinese company labels videos from state-controlled media accounts and does not show them in its feed if they are identified as political posts. It has also begun issuing regular reports on political interference activities.

(According to Bloomberg)