On Oct. 14, Facebook and Twitter made the decision to remove a dubious New York Post story from their platforms—provoking heated debate in the internet’s various echo chambers. The article in question purportedly revealed influence peddling by Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, and the social media giants suspected that the uncorroborated claims were based on hacked or fabricated correspondences. Weeks before the U.S. presidential election, Silicon Valley’s swift and decisive action in response to disinformation is a stark contrast to its handling of hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign four years ago.
A week prior, on Oct. 7, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it had seized nearly 100 websites linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). These sites had been engaged in a global disinformation campaign, targeting audiences from the United States to Southeast Asia with pro-Iranian propaganda. But it wasn’t just the government engaged in countering adversaries online: One day later, Facebook and Twitter reported that they had taken down more than a dozen disinformation networks used by political and state-backed groups in Iran, Russia, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand.
