Fears of online misinformation are rising ahead of the midterms. Experts warn false information could be an even greater threat this year as Pro-Trump candidates who questioned the validity of the 2020 election are on the ballot. Stephanie Humphrey, technology and lifestyle expert, explains what the consequences could be of having election deniers elected to office this fall. 

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Misinformation Concerns Rise Ahead of Midterms

fears of online misinformation are rising ahead of the midterms, experts warn, false information could be an even greater threat this year as pro trump candidates who questioned the validity of the 2020 election are on the ballot here with more insight is Stephanie Humphrey technology and lifestyle expert Stephanie, welcome to the show as the november elections approach right around the corner, you know, they'll be here before we know it. How concerned are you about the spread of misinformation on the social media platforms? Well, I think it's a concern of mine all the time. I mean, I think starting with the 2016 elections and and all the way up through now, um social media has been a tool used by people that want to do engage in that type of behavior to spread information. They made it very easy to do on these platforms. So I think we're only going to see that increase as we head into the midterms. So which platforms are more susceptible to the rapid spread of false information, They all are because there is such an uneven application of content moderation policies across the platforms. But I would say Tiktok is probably a little bit more susceptible now, just because of the way that things can go viral on that platform right now. And the fact that video tends to be a little harder to moderate that text content and Tiktok is primarily video. Oh, that's really good point, especially with a billion users on that platform. We know twitter unveiled a strategy last week to combat the rise of misinformation, you know this as well as I do a lot of experts say this fall short of what's needed, what's your take on this should twitter and other social media platforms do more to get ahead of the problem this time around. Yeah, absolutely. Twitter unveiled what they call their civic integrity policy, which doesn't sound like a lot more than what they did a little while back when they started flagging potentially misleading content. All they're gonna add to that now it seems like is that they will label the content and they may add some additional resources that people can go to to sort of fact check what is being put out there and they're they're saying that they're not gonna recommend um these things widely if they have been labeled But but again, it it really isn't enough because it places a lot of the onus on the users to go and do their own research, which as we know, most people don't do know, they certainly don't. And according to an analysis by Fivethirtyeight at least 100 and 20 Republican candidates who believe that the 2020 election was stolen have made it to the general election. We need to say wholeheartedly was not, it was President biden did win fair and square, but how might the spread of misinformation contribute to the outcomes of these elections. Well, I think if we get some of these folks that are campaigning on this idea of election, uh you know misinformation and things like that. If they get into office, we are going to probably see some of our voting rights become very limited. Things like mail and voting and early voting. Um, they will have the right to decertify election results or override them or challenge them in some way and I think it just contributes to an overall mistrust in the democratic process. Stephanie, how can the average person spot misinformation on social media? Because I've seen some of these spots and they look valid. They look very real. It can be very, very challenging to discern what is real and what is fake on the internet. Especially in this era of deepfakes and other things like that. But a couple of things you can do is number one read the article. We don't even do that anymore with headlines being so click batey these days they can stir up emotion right from the headline and people just automatically share but definitely don't share before you read the article especially as it relates to election information and you know, uh covid information, vaccine information, verify with another source, something like politifact and Snopes or some other third party verification source. Don't just trust anything you read on social media honestly unless you know the source also check the dates sometimes outdated information gets re shared as if it was current. Um check the source, check the author. You can do a lot of research, check the photos in the article, do a reverse image search and google on the photos to make sure they are actually something that should go with that article and not photos from an article from years past. So you really have to, you know, dig in and do some research as you're reading these articles to make sure that they're true. That is fantastic advice. How else can we prevent the spread of disinformation? So what happened after the 2020 election? And of course the events on january 6th, never happened in our country again, Stephanie, It's gonna be tough. And I think the social media platforms themselves could do a lot more. They could hire more moderators as of 2020. Tiktok only had about 10,000 human moderators working for them. And when you think about a billion active monthly users, that literally is not even a drop in the bucket. So I think more human moderators are necessary and also more transparency around these algorithms and how they make their recommendations. I know across the board. Uh social media platforms don't do a good enough job of letting us know how, why we're seeing the information that we're seeing and how to stop it. That's such a good point. We have less than a minute Stephanie, but I have to ask what could the consequences of having election deniers elected to offices across our country. It really does amount to kind of an eroding of faith and democracy honestly because when you have people in office that can overturn the will of the people, the election results, um, it really does start to erode faith in our democracy as a whole. So it can be a very scary idea to consider really great talking to you. We hope you come back soon, Stephanie Humphrey, technology and lifestyle expert. Thank you.