In 2020, the need to contain misinformation about COVID-19 pushed Facebook and Twitter into a role they never wanted—arbiters of the truth.December 28, 2020
Evelyn Douek, Affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, The Atlantic
For years, social-media platforms had held firm: Just because a post was false didn’t mean it was their place to do anything about it. But 2020 changed their minds.
At the end of May, Twitter for the first time labeled a tweet from the president of the United States as potentially misleading. After Donald Trump falsely insisted that mail-in voting would rig the November election, the platform added a message telling users to “get the facts.” Within a day, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, had appeared on Fox News to reassure viewers that Facebook had “a different policy” and believed strongly that tech companies shouldn’t be arbiters of truth of what people say online. But come November, between the time polls closed and the race was called for Biden, much of Trump’s Facebook page, as well as more than a third of Trump’s Twitter feed, was plastered with warning labels and fact-checks, a striking visual manifestation of the way that 2020 has transformed the internet. Seven months ago, that first label on a Trump tweet was a watershed event. Now it’s entirely unremarkable.
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