Was YouTube Too Slow To Remove Election Fraud Content?
Yesterday, on their official blog, YouTube announced that they will (now) begin to take down “any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election …”. This is a good step, but there’s a strong chance that by not acting earlier to take this content down, YouTube (and other social media platforms) might have fueled voter distrust and lack of confidence, especially among Trump voters and Republicans.
YouTube justified this change in policy by noting that the safe harbor deadline for the election had passed, and that a sufficiently large number of states have now certified their presidential election results. Whether in YouTube’s opinion that means that the claims of election fraud or errors are now irrelevant, or if they believe the fraud claims do not have factual support, isn’t clear from their post. And while the post notes many of the proactive steps that YouTube took during the election (they mention deleting over 8,000 channels and “thousands of harmful and misleading election-related videos”) are important, that they still allowed misleading content about election fraud with little factual basis to remain on their platform might have lasting consequences for how confident American voters are in the election process. Finally, there are important distinctions between YouTube’s new policy, and the policies that were implemented during the 2020 Presidential election by Facebook and Twitter, but that’s really a topic best taken up in a later story that can really dig into those differences.
Nicholas Adams-Cohen, a member of our research group, wrote a fascinating piece on Medium last week, “Suppression or Manipulation? Comparing Perspectives on US Election Security Between Biden and Trump Voters.” He shows a really important figure in his piece, demonstrating the highly partisan split in the type of concerning information received on social media about election integrity during the election. In particular, Nicholas showed that Trump voters were much more likely than Biden voters to receive concerning social media information on voter fraud, voting machine tampering, duplicate voting, and non-citizen voting, many of the same themes that are no doubt in the content that YouTube will now not allow on its platform.
In a related report, the Monitoring the Election project at Caltech released a research memo last week presenting new data on voter confidence in the immediate aftermath of the November 2020 election. This report shows that there are very substantial gaps in voter confidence, in particular regarding whether the election was administered well nationally, between Republican and Democratic registered voters, and also between Trump and Biden supporters.
Remarkably, the Monitoring the Election report showed that 44% of Trump voters said that they were not at all confident in election administration at the national level, and that another 26% of Trump voters were not too confident. But 48% of Biden voters were very confident in the nation’s election administration, and 39% were somewhat confident.
Correlation is not causation, and we need to be careful attributing cause-and-effect. But these data imply that since Trump supporters were more exposed to concerning social media claims about voter fraud, and since Trump voters lack confidence in the national administration of the election, that by not doing a better job removing misleading or false claims about voter fraud social media platforms like YouTube might have allowed the distribution of information that has fueled this large partisan gap in voter confidence.
Clearly we need to do a great deal of additional research to better connect social media content, exposure to that content, and attitudes and perceptions about the integrity of the 2020 presidential election. We need to give social media platforms better guidance, based on the science, about how their content may lead to problematic outcomes that could have lasting consequences for how much trust American voters have in their election process and voting infrastructure. Research groups like ours also need to do more analysis of the effects of these policies, stay tuned!
