From election night onwards, Twitter and Facebook have continued to label inaccurate election posts from Trump, his campaign staff, and others
who ran “Stop the Steal PAC.” https://twitter.com/... Kurt Wagner / @kurtwagner8 : Trump's tweets keep getting flagged for including misleading information. So it looks like he's just repurposing them as official statements now. https://twitter.com/... Daniel Dale / @ddale8 : In general, the social-media information environment is pretty bad right now — way worse and with way more deliberate deception in the MAGAsphere, but still not great in other circles — and people would be wise to hesitate before sharing stuff and before freaking out. Alex Stamos / @alexstamos : This is the most intense online disinformation event in US history and the pace of what we have found has only accelerated since election day. We should hold the platforms accountable for upholding their policies, not ask for the overall discussion to be bent “our” direction. @rmac18 : Looking at Facebook Live now, the top recommended streams are a radio show stream entertaining theories like “Trump votes were counted for Biden” (11k concurrent viewers) and right-wing partisan channel Newsmax (7k). https://twitter.com/...
New York Times
Context & Ripple Effects
This story sits at the sharp end of the 2020 vote count: the night before, Twitter had placed sharing restrictions on Trump tweets alleging election theft while Facebook merely added labels warning results might not be final — and within a day Facebook extended its policy to label any presidential candidate or 'other individual' declaring premature victory in a state or overall. The two platforms are now running visibly different enforcement regimes against the same posts from the same account.
The longer arc matters too: after the 2018 midterms, experts judged that Facebook's machinery worked only when outside monitors prodded it, and a Washington Post review after the 2022 midterms found both companies had done little to actually refute inaccurate election claims from at least 26 candidates — so these November 2020 labels are the stress test whose results that later audit graded.
First-order effects
Trump is already routing around the labels: as Kurt Wagner notes, his repeatedly flagged tweets are being repurposed as official statements, meaning the restriction applies to the tweet format but not to the claim's distribution through other channels.
Because Twitter throttles sharing while Facebook declines to reduce spread of the same allegations, Facebook's users bear the full viral exposure of claims Twitter has dampened — an enforcement asymmetry visible post-by-post.
Second-order effects
Flagged claims have somewhere else to go: entities like Newsmax and the MAGAsphere information circuit Daniel Dale describes give labeled content a distribution layer outside Twitter's and Facebook's reach, so suppression on one surface shifts traffic rather than eliminating it.
The divergence pressures both companies toward converging election rules — each platform's lighter-touch choice becomes the other's political talking point about who is really enforcing integrity.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, election labeling becomes a permanent standing regime rather than a crisis measure — but the 2022 review suggests labels alone do not refute claims, pointing platforms toward harder interventions (sharing limits, authoritative refutation) or toward regulators imposing consistency they will not adopt themselves.
The deeper structure is adversarial verification: every enforcement move trains the producing side to repackage content — official statements, PAC accounts, friendly outlets — which means platform trust systems must keep iterating faster than the workarounds they create.
The trend: Election misinformation labeling is hardening from ad-hoc crisis response into standing platform policy, even as its actual effect on false claims remains contested.
We are continuing to label all posts from both presidential candidates making it clear that votes are still being counted and a winner has not been projected. We are also applying these labels to other individuals who declare premature victory in individual states or overall. htt…
Facebook itself pushes back on this idea, but it really feels like the company's increasingly aggressive moderation policies are at least partly enabled by a diminished fear of angering the right, as a Biden presidency grows more likely. https://twitter.com/...
It's critical that people have accurate information about elections results. To that end we're expanding our premature declaration of victory labels to apply to people beyond the presidential candidates. We'll apply these at state-level and overall. https://twitter.com/...
All these months of handwringing over social networks and their rules about false claims of victory will feel pretty moot if TV networks just carry the same claims live on air with no context.
REPORT: Half of President Trump's posts since election day have been flagged as misinformation by Facebook & Twitter and censored on each platform. As of now, it appears that none of Joe Biden's posts have been flagged. https://www.breitbart.com/...
Imagine if the big social platforms had spent the past 5-10 years disincentivizing misinformation, instead of unwittingly and/or uncaringly incentivizing the hell out of it. Would Trump even have won in the first place? https://twitter.com/...
Now seems like a good time to remind everyone that @Facebook's head of global policy, Joel Kaplan, was one of the original architects of 2000's phony “Brooks Brothers riot,” along with Roger Stone — who ran “Stop the Steal PAC.” https://twitter.com/...
Trump's tweets keep getting flagged for including misleading information. So it looks like he's just repurposing them as official statements now. https://twitter.com/...
In general, the social-media information environment is pretty bad right now — way worse and with way more deliberate deception in the MAGAsphere, but still not great in other circles — and people would be wise to hesitate before sharing stuff and before freaking out.
This is the most intense online disinformation event in US history and the pace of what we have found has only accelerated since election day. We should hold the platforms accountable for upholding their policies, not ask for the overall discussion to be bent “our” direction.
Looking at Facebook Live now, the top recommended streams are a radio show stream entertaining theories like “Trump votes were counted for Biden” (11k concurrent viewers) and right-wing partisan channel Newsmax (7k). https://twitter.com/...
*THIS IS FACTUALLY INCORRECT* Trump claims victory in Pennsylvania on @Facebook before any trusted source has called the election in that state. This tiny label from Facebook is actively amplifying the spread of this disinfo and complicit in a premature declaration of victory. ht…
I feel like there's a discussion to be had about how, in the fight against election disinformation, Facebook and Google also sold out the very news providers that could help with that problem. ⬇️