Freedom of speech is under attack now more than ever. The New York Times reported earlier this week that Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and Youtube will censor whatever they deem “political misinformation” and “disinformation”. This is all in preparation for the upcoming 2022 midterm elections.
Meta has revealed that its efforts of stopping this misinformation will be more “targeted and strategic” and they will be sticking to the same efforts from previous elections. In addition, Facebook & Instagram will have more fact-checkers and misinformation labels on posts made by users. One question, who is fact-checking the fact-checkers?
TikTok came out in an announcement saying they will remove “election misinformation” related content. Any organic content created surrounding the ideas of voter fraud, mail-in voting, and deep fakes of candidates. As long as the content stays within the platform’s “community guidelines” then it will remain up. In addition, they do not allow any political ads on the platform.
TikTok has now created an “elections center” on the app where users can find voting information in there are polling places, ballots, and candidate information. They will also be pushing content under #Elections2022 that is in their guidelines. Many lawmakers are calling for information about TikTok’s internal operations.
The company’s partner company is ByteDance which is a Chinese media company. A recent investigation put out by Forbes showed that 300 Employees at ByteDance previously worked at CCP state media outlets. TikTok has not made it clear how many human moderators are active on the platform vs algorithm moderation.
