Announcing our Elections Integrity Program
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We are extremely excited to announce our Elections Integrity Program! This is something that we’ve been working on behind the scenes for over a month now, but we finally have all the products ready to launch! You can follow along with all our work here on our Elections Integrity Program Hub.
Our community has decades of collective experience working to protect democratic elections on social media platforms from within the companies. Our Elections Program Lead, Katie Harbath, has almost a decade of collaborating with civic orgs from within Facebook on her own. And we are excited to be able to share that expertise thanks to a generous grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
A lot of our elections program is happening behind the scenes. We have been convening events connecting integrity workers with experience in the elections space with people who are working at the platforms now on the current elections. These have led to many fruitful discussions around what risks and events to prepare for, how to build escalation chains that will be effective in times of crisis, and how to make sure elections issues are not slipping through the cracks.
But there are plenty of public projects to highlight!
Katie Harbath has been working with the Bipartisan Policy Center to create a historical database of public announcements from platforms relating to elections as well as what actions the platforms have discussed in the public announcements on the upcoming US midterms.
We also have prepared a Misinformation Amplification Tracking Dashboard, which is quantifying the extent to which the major platforms are amplifying misinformation through their platform and algorithm design.
The dashboard is launching today! And you can read about it in the New York Times! Our Misinformation Amplification Factor (MAF) tracks how much engagement misinformation posts get online, as assessed by IFCN fact checkers, relative to how much engagement they are expected to get based on historical engagement numbers for the creator who posted the misinformation.
Our findings show that platform design choices have a serious impact on how much additional distribution misinformation can get. Twitter and TikTok, which both have strong virality mechanisms through Retweeting and engagement focused recommendation algorithms of all public content, have the highest MAFs of around 30. Meaning that misinformation gets 30x more engagement than the baseline expectation.
Instagram, on the other hand, has the lowest MAF, 2.9, which reflects the fact that there are few mechanisms for virality on the platform. Even though Facebook and Instagram have the lowest MAFs, they are still substantial, 4.2 and 2.9 respectively, which indicates that Meta’s fact checking program is not able to stop the amplification of misinformation on their platforms.
We will be tracking the MAF for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube leading into the US midterm elections, to track if misinformation narratives are taking hold on the platforms, or if the platforms are able to put measures in place to limit the spread of misinfo during this critical period.
Read about our findings in our report and check out our tracking dashboard that will be updated weekly.
Cheers,
Jeff
