Experts say a campaign of legal and political pressure from the right has cast efforts to combat rumors and conspiracy theories as censorship. And as a result, they say, the tools and partnerships that tried to flag and tamp down on falsehoods in recent election cycles have been scaled back or dismantled. That’s even as threats loom from foreign governments and artificial intelligence, and as former President Donald Trump, who still falsely claims to have won the 2020 contest, is likely to use the same tactics again as he pursues the White House in 2024.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The federal government described it as a working group, without “any operational authority or capability,” tasked with coordinating efforts to identify false and misleading claims and share facts about security concerns, from elections to natural disasters.
Amid that furor, in May 2022, the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana filed a lawsuit accusing the Biden administration of colluding with social media companies to censor conservative speech, by pressing platforms to take action on misleading posts about COVID-19 and elections.
Pressure is coming from Congress as well, where the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, led by GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, a Trump ally, is conducting its own probe into alleged collusion between the Biden administration and tech companies to unconstitutionally shut down political speech.
Jordan is subpoenaing researchers and social media companies, demanding years of email correspondence and conducting hours-long interviews, which his staff has used to make explosive accusations against federal agencies, nonprofit organizations and academic institutions.
Under public pressure, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites created policies prohibiting false election claims and set up teams devoted to monitoring abuse, from cracking down on posts telling people the wrong day to vote to disrupting coordinated influence operations backed by foreign governments.
“The weaponized criticism of research on misinformation is having a negative impact on our ability to understand and address what many of us feel to be a pretty large societal problem,” said Kate Starbird, a co-founder of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, one of the members of the EIP.
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