Social media platforms promote extremist groups and promulgate foreign adversaries’ election disinformation ahead of Election Day

In the final stretch to Election Day, we continue to see social media platforms wreaking havoc. Reports have emerged of how Facebook has autogenerated pages for extremist militias that enable them to more easily recruit and coordinate and how foreign adversaries have taken advantage of social media to spread election disinformation. In response, Issue One’s Vice President of Technology Reform Alix Fraser offered the following statement:

“Social media companies are undermining the pillars of our democracy and willingly supporting terrorism. Not only are their executives failing to stop our greatest adversaries from spreading false information about our election, they are actively amplifying it to boost their profits. These products are so broken that they are automatically creating tools for foreign and domestic terrorists to recruit, organize, and ultimately harm Americans and undermine our electoral system. They want to ‘move fast and break things,’ and in this case, those ‘things’ are the foundation of our democracy. These recent examples show why Congress needs to pass responsible safeguards, including updating the outdated Section 230 of the Communications’ Decency Act, to ensure that Big Tech companies are held accountable for harmful products and dangerous design features.”