Technology

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Social media companies are receding from their role as watchdogs against political misinformation, abandoning their most aggressive efforts to police online falsehoods in a trend expected to profoundly affect the 2024 presidential election.

These shifts are a reaction from social media executives to being battered by contentious battles over content and concluding there is “no winning,” said Katie Harbath, former director of public policy at Facebook, where she managed the global elections strategy across the company.

In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, social media companies ramped-up investigative teams to quash foreign influence campaigns and paid thousands of content moderators to debunk viral conspiracies.

Civil rights groups pressured the platforms — including in meetings with Zuckerberg and Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg — to bolster their election policies, arguing the pandemic and popularity of mail-in ballots created an opening for bad actors to confuse voters about the electoral process.

Internal momentum to impose the new rule seemed to plummet after Musk boasted of his plans to turn Twitter into a safe haven for “free speech” — a principle Zuckerberg and some board members had always lauded, one of the people said.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri, who led efforts to build Threads, said earlier this year that the platform would not actively “encourage” politics and “hard news,” because the extra user engagement is not worth the scrutiny.

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