One of the biggest questions heading into election night is whether former president Donald Trump will declare victory prematurely. The announcement is likely to be accompanied by social media posts on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok—none of which will say whether they will remove the content.
He’s done it before: Trump lied about winning the 2020 election when many battleground states were too close to call. Counting was underway in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. A number of Republican lawmakers and experts have criticized Trump’s claims. Ben Shapiro, founder of the Daily Wire, said “No, Trump hasn’t won the election, and it’s not too much of a responsibility for him to say he has,” in X’s post at the time. Trump’s own advisers are reportedly encouraging him to declare victory early.
“Premature claims of victory intended to intimidate people from voting or suppress voting may be reviewed under our Local Integrity policy,” X spokesman Michael Abboud tells WIRED. “Community Notes are an effective way to add useful context to potentially misleading Posts about polling results.”
UX empowers users to flag and correct misinformation on social media through Social Notes. A recent study by the Center for Counting Digital Hate found that crowdsourced fact-checking campaigns do a poor job of correcting false election claims.
IX, run by billionaire Elon Musk, has already become a hotbed of election misinformation, and that doesn’t look to change anytime soon. Last week, Musk’s America PAC launched the Election Integrity Community on X, which has grown to nearly 50,000 members. The party says it will increase “incidences of voter fraud or irregularities that you see while voting in the 2024 election.”
In 2020, Meta said it will add labels to early victory posts. At this time, Corey Chambliss, a spokesperson for Meta, shared a blog post with WIRED explaining that the company will remove inaccurate information related to the dates, locations, times, and methods of voting and calls related to voting violence. Meta will also remove content containing false election results, according to the blog, but Chambliss did not answer whether that rule applies to Trump.
“As with all of our policies, we will continue to monitor what we see on the field,” Chambliss told WIRED on Tuesday.
Advertisements announcing a false result, however, are banned. Meta is banning new ads for the week before Election Day, and said it will extend that ban until several days after polls close, Axios reported Monday.
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