How Facebook and Twitter fight online voter suppression for the midterms with algorithm changes and partnerships with organizations that report disinformation
Facebook and Twitter aren't just trying to drive people to the polls — they're racing to fight back bad actors who seek to deter their users from voting.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years after disinformation became a board-level problem for social platforms, Facebook and Twitter are treating the 2018 midterms as their first full-scale test: tweaking ranking algorithms to demote suppression content and wiring outside fact-checking organizations into their reporting pipelines. The midterm playbook they built here became the template both companies reused ahead of the 2019 Democratic debates.
The verdict was mixed almost immediately. A study of 250K posts and 5K political ads documented how much politically motivated misinformation still circulated on Facebook despite the new controls, while a post-election assessment credited real progress but flagged engagement-based ranking as the structural reason the problem persists.
First-order effects
- Voter-suppression posts aimed at Facebook and Twitter users face faster demotion and removal during the final days before the midterms, with fact-checking partners acting as an outsourced flagging layer.
- Coordinated bad actors lose the frictionless distribution that made 2016-style suppression campaigns cheap to run on these two platforms specifically.
Second-order effects
- Because engagement-based ranking still rewards inflammatory content, suppression attempts migrate toward whatever formats the algorithms amplify — the same dynamic later visible when YouTube's recommendation cuts pushed election-video traffic toward mainstream channels like Fox News rather than eliminating it.
- Every subsequent US election now forces Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube into pre-announced enforcement plans, as seen in their coordinated Election Day clampdowns — turning integrity staffing into a recurring operating cost.
Third-order effects
- External fact-checkers become de facto content regulators for political speech, shifting moderation authority from platform policy teams to a standing public-private apparatus activated around elections.
- The pattern points toward redistribution rather than elimination of misinformation reach: suppressing fringe sources moves audience share to surviving outlets, so platform governance increasingly decides which publishers win election-cycle attention.
The trend: Platform election integrity is hardening from ad-hoc fixes into permanent, election-cycled infrastructure where algorithmic ranking choices and third-party fact-checkers jointly allocate political reach.