BAKU, Azerbaijan, Social media in US has done much since 2020 to monitor election coverage, Dr. Pippa Norris, a lecturer in comparative politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Founding Director of the Electoral Integrity Project, said during the Foreign Press Center’s briefing on US Midterm Elections 2022, Trend reports.

She pointed out that foreign interference was very much a challenge in the 2020 presidential elections.

“Interestingly, while I have seen some initiatives in order to try to improve cybersecurity, there’s been almost no discussion of that in the media, in the midterm elections. And I think that there are some important reasons why that might be the case. But in 2020 – I mean 2016, of course, there were real questions, as there were in Europe, about challenges to domestic media and the ways in which, in particular, Facebook and other social media had interference by people in particular who were from other countries but posing as average Americans, but – essentially spreading hate speech and very negative images of both parties – but primarily of the Democratic Part,” she said.

Norris believes that what’s happened is that since then, the social media in America have really learnt some of those lessons.

“Facebook set up a big unit in order to monitor election coverage, and it changed some of its policies. Twitter has done much the same. And there are obviously many, many other social media outlets which are available, but I think that we’ve learnt some of the lessons about foreign interference through social media in covert ways, which means that it hasn’t been as much of an issue so far in the election of 2020. It is entirely possible, however, that it might come back for 2024. In particular, for example, as you might have heard, Elon Musk is talking about taking over Twitter, and one of the things he proposes to do is to reduce some of the filtering which is going on, including a lot of the staff. He’s proposing a 75 percent staff cutting at Twitter, and the staff are very much part of the monitoring units which have been seeing if there is interference either in this issue or in other forms of conspiracy, because there are many other conspiracy theories which are – which obviously are spreading as well,” she said.

Norris thinks social media has temporarily caught up, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll continue to act as an effective filter. “And this is still a major threat to the quality of the information, and misinformation and disinformation, of course, is being as spread as much by domestic sources as it is by foreign sources. So that’s – that hasn’t changed, but it doesn’t necessarily need to come from abroad because basically there’s enough conspiracy theorists in America to spread it all by ourselves.”

Source: TREND News Agency