Will Social Platforms Take Down a Premature Donald Trump Victory Post?

November 6, 2024:

One of the big questions going into election night is whether former president Donald Trump will prematurely declare victory. That declaration would likely be accompanied by social media posts on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok—none of which will say whether they would remove the content.

He’s done it before: Trump falsely declared himself the winner of the 2020 election when many battleground states were still too close to call. Counts were still ongoing in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. A number of Republican lawmakers and pundits rebuked Trump’s claims. Ben Shapiro, cofounder of the Daily Wire, said “No, Trump has not already won the election, and it is deeply irresponsible for him to say that he has,” in an X post at the time. Trump’s own advisers are reportedly encouraging him to announce an early victory.

“Premature claims of victory that are intended to intimidate people from voting or suppress voting may be evaluated under our Civic Integrity policy,” X spokesperson Michael Abboud tells WIRED. “Community Notes are an effective way to add helpful context to Posts that may be misleading about voting results.”

X authorizes users to flag and correct misinformation on its platforms through Community Notes. A recent Center for Countering Digital Hate study found that the crowdsourced fact-checking initiative does a poor job of correcting false election claims.

X, which is owned by billionaire Elon Musk, has already become a hotbed for election misinformation, and that doesn’t look to be changing anytime soon. Last week, Musk’s America PAC launched an Election Integrity Community on X, which has grown to nearly 50,000 members. The group says it will elevate “incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.

In 2020, Meta said that it would add labels to early victory posts. This time around, Corey Chambliss, a Meta spokesperson, shared a blog post with WIRED explaining that the company will remove misinformation related to the dates, locations, times, and methods of voting and voting-related calls for violence. Meta will also remove content containing false election results, according to the blog post, but Chambliss did not respond to whether that rule applied to Trump.

“As with all of our policies, we will continue to monitor what we’re seeing on-platform,” Chambliss told WIRED on Tuesday.

Ads declaring a false outcome, however, are banned. Meta bans new election ads for the week before election day, and said it would extend that ban up until a few days after polls close, Axios reported on Monday.

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