WASHINGTON – Before there was the Elon Musk-Mark Zuckerberg cage match, there was an Ed Markey-Elon Musk blue checkmark dust-up.
Sen. Edward Markey, a veteran Democratic lawmaker with decades of experience in oversight, was trying to prove a point. A fake Ed Markey had popped up on Twitter, and someone had paid for the once-coveted blue checkmark on the account to indicate to social media users that it was authentic.
It was not, of course, and the public spat that ensued over the fake account – which Markey later revealed he knew about all along – foreshadowed a drama that is unfolding over the role the once-formidable social media giant will play in the 2024 election. Markey sent Musk a sternly worded letter accusing him of “selling the truth” in a way that is “dangerous and unacceptable,” and Musk clapped back online by making fun of him: “Your real account sounds like a parody.”
The back-and-forth was one of many developments related to Twitter in recent months that have highlighted concerns about the influential social media website among lawmakers and regulators, former Twitter executives, national security officials and other analysts.
With the 2024 presidential election campaign ramping up, they told USA TODAY that Twitter is more vulnerable than ever to the spread of misinformation, the amplification of divisive content and coordinated disinformation campaigns that could influence the outcome of the race.
Markey and some watchdog groups warn that the federal government may need to play a bigger role in combatting disinformation on social media platforms, especially during election season. Meanwhile, others say Washington should stay out of the process and allow people to exercise freedom of speech.
In a GOP victory, judge restricts Biden officials from contacting social media about content
Earlier this month, a Louisiana federal judge restricted some branches of the Biden administration from communicating or meeting with social media platforms about content moderation on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter unless it involved national security threats and criminal activity. The ruling was a response to a lawsuit brought by GOP attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, alleging that government officials, under the guise of curbing misinformation, colluded with social media platforms to remove conservative voices and viewpoints, including posts about the COVID pandemic and Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The ruling comes as a debate about possible government intervention in social media political activity is intensifying, and national security and cybersecurity experts wonder if foreign countries will try to influence the U.S. election. Some analysts want social media companies to do more policing of their own platform. And they worry that Twitter, under Musk, lacks the tools to do so.
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New boss, longstanding election-related problems
In Markey’s case, a Washington Post reporter created the @realEdMarkey account with the senator’s permission. But, technology experts say, it just as easily could have been someone trying to sow chaos in the United States, including an opposition political campaign, a tech-savvy teenager or a foreign power like Russia, China or Iran.
Russia in particular has meddled in U.S. elections already, including mounting what federal authorities described as a coordinated disinformation campaign on Twitter to sway voters in the 2016 presidential election.
But many kinds of disinformation campaigns have occurred in recent U.S. elections, including efforts to target communities of color in the 2022 midterms.
Some have come in the form of intentional lies disguised as truth. In other cases, falsehoods and smear campaigns were made to go viral in an effort to prevent people from knowing where and when to vote, or which candidates and issues to support.
Since buying Twitter for $44 billion last October, Musk has slashed more than 80% of its staff, from 8,000 to 1,500. He has also fired or forced out top executives – and in some cases entire teams − in key operational and security roles designed to counter election disinformation, hate speech and other problems on the platform.
And Musk, a staunch free speech advocate who envisions Twitter as an unfettered public square, has reinstated high-profile election deniers – including former President Donald Trump – and far-right extremists who are already laying the foundation for future clashes over what they claim are rigged local, state and national U.S. election systems.
“The lack of enforcement of policies around hate speech, disinformation, and platform manipulation, combined with cuts to the content moderation staff and the recent loss of the head of Trust and Safety, send a message that Twitter is not serious about keeping harmful content off the platform,” said Caroline Orr Bueno, a digital disinformation, deception, and influence expert at the University of Maryland.
“And you can be sure that bad actors will get the message – and some of them will act on it,” Orr Bueno told USA TODAY. “And when that happens, it’s not clear that anyone at Twitter is even equipped or empowered to detect election-related disinformation or influence campaigns, nor is there any reason to be confident that Twitter will be quick to act on something like this, given the direction that the company has gone in recent months.”
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Twitter’s response: Freedom of Speech, Not Reach
A senior Twitter official said the company would have no comment in response to a detailed list of questions sent by USA TODAY.
But a person familiar with Twitter executives’ thinking told USA TODAY that the company, and Musk’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino in particular, have been busy working inside the company and out to upgrade security and content moderation efforts.
That person, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss Twitter operations, said Musk and Yaccarino both support an aggressive program to counter election disinformation here and overseas. And Twitter is working to bolster brand safety so advertisers can stay away from content that they deem to be divisive, that person said.
Central to that, this person said, is Twitter’s Freedom of Speech, Not Reach policy, which allows for the virtually unregulated freedom of speech championed by Musk, but with restrictions that limit how widely offensive posts can be shared.
“Restricting the reach of Tweets, also known as visibility filtering, is one of our existing enforcement actions that allows us to move beyond the binary “leave up versus take down” approach to content moderation,” @TwitterSafety announced in an April 17 posting. “However, like other social platforms, we have not historically been transparent when we’ve taken this action. Starting soon, we will add publicly visible labels to Tweets identified as potentially violating our policies letting you know we’ve limited their visibility.”
Twitter went even further on July 12, saying it will label — and restrict sharing of — content that it deems to be abusive behavior or violent speech.
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A ‘breeding ground of manipulation and deceit’?
After Markey’s November letter, Twitter quickly suspended the fake @realEdMarkey account.
But Markey, a member of the Subcommittee on Communication, Media, and Broadband, has yet to receive a response from Twitter addressing the broader concerns he raised with Musk, spokesman Ahmad Ali said.
Markey told USA TODAY that he believes serious problems at Twitter will continue to enable bad actors and erode public trust, both online and at the ballot box.
“Under its new leadership, Twitter has cut essential staff dedicated to trust, safety, and accessibility on the platform. That’s unacceptable,” Markey said, referring to Musk. “As the head of a global town square, Elon Musk has a responsibility to ensure Twitter does not serve as a breeding ground of manipulation and deceit.”
“If Twitter truly wants to operate as the trusted, nonpartisan, accountable platform it espouses to be, especially during a contested election year, it will immediately commit to reducing misinformation and fraudulent accounts and respond to my concerns about upgrading its security and operations,” Markey said.
Some critics, including Markey and other lawmakers like fellow Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., are especially concerned about the recent prevalence of sophisticated Deepfake videos and other rapid advances in artificial intelligence.
In early June, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used what appeared to be fake, AI-generated images to attack Trump, his rival Republican candidate. Days later, dozens of Democratic strategists met on Zoom to discuss how to counter an expected explosion of AI-generated fake content.
Meanwhile, so many advertisers, spooked by Musk’s words and actions, have fled Twitter that the company’s net worth April 28 was valued at $15 billion, or just one-third of what he paid for it – though that preceded Yaccarino’s hiring.
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Praise for Musk from the right
Musk has won praise from free speech advocates and U.S. conservatives, in part because of his eagerness to criticize those who ran Twitter before him for being too heavy-handed in curbing free speech.
Two months after taking over, Musk released internal documents that he said bolstered his claims, including some that purportedly showed Twitter’s interference in the 2020 presidential election by censoring New York Post reporting on President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and the alleged evidence of Biden family corruption it contained.
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“The information shows that Twitter employees knew they had no legitimate basis to censor the Hunter Biden reporting but proceeded anyway,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said in a floor speech last December. “The documents make clear that Twitter was effectively an arm of the Democratic Party and the Biden campaign.”
Former Twitter executives Yoel Roth and Vijaya Gadde later told Congress they wouldn’t have blocked a story about Hunter Biden from Twitter in the run-up to the 2020 election. But they strongly denied being pressured to do so by Democrats or the FBI, as Grassley and other Republicans claimed.
‘Sudden and alarming’ changes under Musk
Soon after Musk’s purchase, Roth – then Twitter’s head of Trust and Safety – tweeted that Twitter had made progress in its efforts to combat disinformation and counter a “surge in hateful conduct” on the platform.
Within days, Roth was out, following disputes over what he said were Musk’s decisions to allow divisive, misleading and potentially harmful content on the platform.
“My teams were responsible for drafting Twitter’s rules and figuring out how to apply them consistently to hundreds of millions of tweets per day,” Roth wrote in a Nov. 18 New York Times op-ed. “In my more than seven years at the company, we exposed government-backed troll farms meddling in elections, introduced tools for contextualizing dangerous misinformation and, yes, banned President Donald Trump from the service.”
Musk had made many “sudden and alarming” changes that undermined Twitter’s ability to stop such meddling and manipulation, Roth wrote, including gutting Twitter’s blue check verification system and reducing staff to “a skeleton crew.”
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Other senior executives have since left as well, including Ella Irwin, Roth’s replacement as head of Trust and Safety. Eight months after leaving Twitter, Roth believes the situation has worsened.
“Election security is not a one-and-done effort,” Roth told USA TODAY. “Government-backed troll farms in Russia, China, Iran, and elsewhere aren’t stopping their efforts to meddle in political affairs around the world, even if Twitter’s attempts to catch them have been defunded.”
“Twitter 1.0 didn’t get it right every time,” Roth said of the efforts during his tenure to balance speech and safety, and security and privacy. “But the recent changes at Twitter don’t so much try to find a balance as completely tip the scales towards a version of free speech that drives away advertisers, puts vulnerable communities in harm’s way, and that the vast majority of social media users don’t want.”
Concerns, but optimism, outside the US
Emily Horne, Twitter’s head of policy communications from 2017 through 2018, said the integrity of elections around the world could be challenged by staff cuts and other policies enacted by Musk.
“That used to be an entire line of effort at Twitter; people who try to stay one step ahead and anticipate the ways that adversaries and bad actors might try to abuse the platform,” according to Horne, who said she also monitored election integrity issues as spokesperson for the Biden White House’s National Security Council from January 2021 to March 2022.
One immediate test is the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which will require far more stringent anti-disinformation policies starting Aug. 25.
EU officials visited Twitter headquarters in San Francisco on June 22 to run a “stress test” to see if the platform would be able to comply.
Thierry Breton, the EU commissioner overseeing social media platforms and election security, found some positive signs, including Musk’s stated interest in using new technologies to combat disinformation and illegal content.
But to comply, Twitter needs to bolster its resources immediately and make other improvements to counter disinformation around elections, Breton said in a Bloomberg TV interview.
Election concerns go beyond Twitter
On June 22, three of Markey’s Democratic colleagues pressed Twitter, and Alphabet-owned Google and Facebook owner Meta about whether massive layoffs at all three have undermined their ability to combat disinformation and other election integrity problems.
“This is particularly troubling given the emerging use of artificial intelligence to mislead voters,” wrote Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Dick Durbin of Illinois and Peter Welch of Vermont.
On the House side, Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., introduced legislation in May to regulate AI in political ads, including requiring labeling on AI-generated content and other “synthetic images.”
Social media platforms have pushed back on most regulations.
Orr Bueno said that going forward, the financial pressure brought on by declining ad sales may force Twitter to make decisions based on profit rather than user safety or national security. And that, she fears, could create more vulnerability as election season heats up.
“There’s an incentive to make it look like engagement on the platform is increasing, and one way of doing that is to let bots, spam, and inauthentic activity proliferate on the platform,” Orr Bueno said.
Musk has said he won’t tolerate bots and spam activity on Twitter.
But, Orr Bueno said, “Another way of doing that is to amplify divisive and controversial content in an effort to drive negative engagement, because at the end of the day, negative engagement is still engagement, and it still gives Twitter the numbers they need.”
