Facebook, Twitter, and Google must remove disinformation, Beto O'Rourke demands

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke’s campaign is demanding that Facebook, Twitter, and Google more aggressively counter disinformation on their platforms. In letters addressed to the companies Friday, O’Rourke’s team outlines how they believe each of them could address the issue after his campaign was falsely linked to a suspected shooter on social media last weekend.

That attack occurred in Odessa, Texas, killing seven people and leaving 25 injured. In the aftermath, bots worked to spread false information across social media with many claiming that the suspected shooter supported Beto O’Rourke. Posts on Facebook and Twitter suggested that the shooter had an O’Rourke sticker on his vehicle. Texas officials have denied any link between the shooter and the O’Rourke campaign.

“As a campaign, we’re almost entirely powerless to stop misinformation,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, O’Rourke’s campaign director, wrote in a tweet earlier this week. “We can tweet corrections, but only a fragment of the people exposed will see it. This rests on Twitter, Facebook, and Google who let this go completely unchecked.”

The campaign was first made aware of the posts from the Democratic National Convention, and O’Malley Dillon said in a Twitter thread on Monday that she was able to identify the original poster’s account — an account that had been suspended and later reinstated before. That tweet is still up and has over 11,000 retweets and 15,000 favorites.

Read more: https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/6/20853447/facebook-twitter-google-beto-orourke-odessa-midland-texas-shooting-disinformation