"Stop the steal" propagandists were doing something unique

The distinct behavior of serial spreaders of misinformation should theoretically make them easy for Facebook or Twitter to identify. Platforms that place warning labels on false or misleading content could penalize accounts that repeatedly create it; after an account earned a certain number of strikes, the platform’s algorithms could suspend it or limit users’ ability to share its posts. But platforms also want to appear politically neutral. Inconveniently for them, our research found that although some election-related misinformation circulated on the left, the pattern of the same accounts repeatedly spreading false or misleading claims about voting, or about the legitimacy of the election itself, occurred almost exclusively among pro-Trump influencers, QAnon boosters, and other outlets on the right. We were not the only ones to observe this; researchers at Harvard described the former president and the right-wing media as driving a “disinformation campaign” around mail-in voter fraud during the 2020 election; the researchers’ prior work had meticulously detailed a “propaganda feedback loop” within the closely linked right-wing media ecosystem.

If the problem were more evenly distributed, policy changes would be harder to miscast as anti-conservative bias. Tech companies are in a bind. They recognize that inaction toward certain crucial types of misinformation puts them at greater risk of regulation by a Democratic administration and investigation by a Democratic Congress. And yet, if any single platform acts too forcefully, it risks provoking the wrath of the hyper-partisan influencers, who take to competing platforms to decry their supposed mistreatment. Social-media companies find themselves in the position of having to act decisively and collectively—and yet, collective action begets further allegations of collusion to silence conservatives.