CISA spokesperson Michael Feldman told me the agency isn’t flagging any election-related disinformation to Twitter or any social media platform. His comments come after an Intercept report last week detailed communications between the government and tech companies, prompting criticism from conservatives and raising concerns among some civil rights advocates.
Instead, Feldman said, state and local officials can flag potential disinformation about their elections to the Center for Internet Security (CIS), a nonprofit which may then pass it on to social media platforms “who, as always, make their own decisions according to their own policies,” he wrote in an email.
With one day to go until the midterm elections, concerns about election disinformation on social media have proliferated, exacerbated by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and subsequent widespread staff layoffs. This election will be the first nationwide test of the democratic process after the 2020 election in which former president Donald Trump falsely claimed — and convinced many of his supporters — that it was stolen from him.
Yet even before Musk’s takeover, Twitter and other social media platforms were already leaving false election claims alone, as my colleagues Naomi Nix, Jeremy Merrill and Hayden Godfrey reported.
[Aw gee, and they had such a great track record in 2020 in preventing voters from reading about and discussing Hunter Biden’s laptop and Biden Inc corruption. — Ed]
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