The American election is over, the transition with the elected president timidly started, but on Facebook the problem of disinformation remains unresolved, in particular because of the “super propagators”, these accounts which disseminate on a large scale unfounded rumors on electoral fraud organized by the Democrats.
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The NGO Avaaz has identified 25 of them, including the pages of Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump (the president’s sons), Kayleigh McEnany (the White House press secretary), ultra-conservative political hosts and commentators Dan Bongino, Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, as well as pro-Trump organizations like Turning Point USA.
So many personalities supporting in his spectacular questioning of the results the current tenant of the White House, who has continued to tweet messages accusing his opponents of having “stolen” the victory.
Since the November 3 poll, misleading content on so-called electoral fraud from these 25 accounts has been “liked”, commented on and shared more than 77 million times, according to preliminary findings from a study by Avaaz.
Not to mention the chief “super propagator”, Donald Trump himself, or the pages linked to his former adviser Steve Bannon, recently deleted by Facebook.
The social media giant had yet multiplied preventive measures to fight against attempts to discredit the democratic process.
The distribution of political advertisements has been restricted and even interrupted. The sources of information deemed reliable have been highlighted. Manipulation campaigns orchestrated from abroad have been foiled.
Virality
Facebook has thus avoided the repetition of the scandals of 2016, when the presidential election which brought the Republican billionaire to power was marked by disinformation operations.
But these tactics were not enough to stem the scourge of false rumors relayed without even having recourse to “farms” of foreign trolls.
“Misinformation doesn’t go viral just like that. The super propagators on this list, with a helping hand from the Facebook algorithm, are at the heart of this flood of lies that now define the political debate for millions of people in the country ”, indignant Fadi Quran, campaign manager at Avaaz.
The NGO also considers that groups play a key role in the virality of various false contents.
In the aftermath of the election, private groups of fans of Trump and his fraud theories have mushroomed.
On November 5, Facebook deleted a public group dubbed #StopTheSteal (“Stop Theft”), which had attracted some 350,000 members in 48 hours.
But according to the NGO First Draft, which specializes in the fight against false information, we should not underestimate the combined power of individuals who relay approximations and fanciful interpretations.
“It is less the big accounts or so-called” super propagators “than the millions of people who continue to circulate this speech,” notes Claire Wardle, director of the organization in the United States.
White list
The social network pinned a very large number of messages from the president and his supporters, signaling that their claims were disputed.
The platform also relies on its “fact-checking” program: around sixty media partners, including AFP, determine whether certain information is false or misleading, in which case its circulation is curbed.
But many associations, elected officials and even employees of the group would like political figures to be no longer exempted.
According to an article in The Information on Tuesday, Facebook in 2018 created a list of around 112,000 accounts belonging to government officials and applicants whose posts should not be verified.
The Information does not know if it is still valid, but says that employees tried to have it abolished in the summer of 2019. They based their argument on an internal study showing that users were more likely to believe in a fake information whether it came from a politician.
But according to Facebook, the study in question has on the contrary made it possible to refine its approach, which consists in pinning the publications of politicians if they contain information invalidated by journalists of the program.
Several media have thus invalidated the interpretation according to which an amateur video showing electoral agents and ballots sent by mail to Los Angeles proved fraud.
When Donald Trump relayed it, the same warning message appeared over it, as for any other user.
But generally speaking, “we don’t believe it is appropriate for us to prevent the speech of politicians from being subjected to public scrutiny,” recalled Joe Osborne, a spokesperson for the platform. .