In late September 2020, a series of photos started spreading on Twitter, showing what looked like at least 1,000 mail-in ballots sitting in dumpsters in Sonoma County, California. The photos, which were being interpreted online as clear evidence of election fraud, caught the attention of misinformation researchers at the University of Washington, who quickly put in a call to Sonoma County election officials.
The photos, they found out, actually showed empty mail-in ballots from 2018, which were being disposed of in accordance with state law. In fact, the state of California had yet to even distribute mail-in ballots for the 2020 election. Sonoma County corrected the record hours later, and the researchers, who were part of an academic coalition called the Election Integrity Partnership, shared the news with tech platforms, which then removed the original tweet.
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But the challenge isn’t just a political one; this kind of monitoring is also more technically difficult now than it was three years ago. A big reason for that is the fact that both Twitter and Reddit have hiked prices on their APIs, effectively cutting off access to tools that once offered a real-time view on breaking news. “Twitter has often been the bellwether for problems. You see this stuff starting to spread on Twitter, and then you can track how it flows on the other platforms,” says Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics at George Washington University and cofounder of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research. “We’re just in a world right now where it’s incredibly difficult, if not impossible in many instances, to do the sort of monitoring the researchers used to do.”
Read the full article in Fast Company.