As the remaining days before the U.S. presidential election dwindle, misinformation is approaching a crescendo—and the big digital platforms are racing to keep up. This week, Twitter will turn off some of its features and Google has changed its search results. Facebook, meanwhile, will ban all new political advertisements for the week in advance of the election, has blocked the conspiracy theory group, QAnon, and has deleted a post by President Donald Trump claiming COVID-19 is less lethal than the flu. Most recently, both Facebook and Twitter have been drawn into a fiery controversy for intervening—hiding, blocking, and then unblocking—a front page story in the New York Post about Joe Biden.
Inevitably, digital platforms will struggle to keep up. Fact-checking organizations will do their best to refute untruths, yet after the genie has escaped the bottle, there is little they can do, since untruths travel further and faster than facts. Witness the New York Times’ Daily Distortions section devoted to all the news that is, in fact, not fit to print; it will serve as amusement for the Times’ regular readers, sure, but it is hard to imagine that it will do much to persuade those who already mistrust the mainstream media.
