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Today’s Links

Articles:
Associated Press:  Meta quieter on election misinformation as midterms loom
Bloomberg:   Meta Pulls Support for Tool Used to Keep Misinformation in Check
Washington Post:  The midterms are here. Critics say Facebook is already behind.
Groups Taking Action:  Common Cause

CORRECTION:   The ADM audio version cites Reuters.  It was in fact Bloomberg News which should have been cited.   Sorry for the error!

You’re listening to the American Democracy Minute, keeping YOUR government by and for the people.

For over a year, the democracy advocacy group Common Cause has been voicing concerns that Facebook, now Meta, was pulling back on efforts to fight election disinformation.  With the midterms upon us, are we being protected from disinformation by domestic and foreign bad actors?

To its credit, Facebook pulled down disinformation that Common Cause and researchers had reported in the runup to the November 2020 election.   But in October 2021, Jesse Littlewood, vice president of campaigns at Common Cause, said in an opinion piece in USA Today that disinformation – intentionally spreading untrue information – was proliferating unchecked after the election.  Now in 2022, there is word that Meta is not only doing little to curb disinformation, it has disbanded its team and the software it was using to find disinformation, CrowdTangle.  

CrowdTangle is analysis software which searches across the Facebook platform, allowing organizations like Common Cause to spot trends in disinformation and report them.   But according to reports in Reuters & the AP, Meta began to shink the support team for the software in the summer of 2021 from 300 to 60, and officially began the shutdown in February 2022.  A spokesperson for Meta said the software would be in place for the 2022 election, and that other Meta employees would be temporarily retasked to support it, but current users report bugs and a lack of support.   

Articles and a Meta statement are at AmericanDemocracyMinute.org

Granny D said Democracy is not something we have, it’s something we DO.   For the American Democracy Minute, I’m Brian Beihl.