Currently, the global COVID-19 pandemic, impending economic crisis and national movement against racial injustice pose a triple threat of interference from hostile foreign powers and voter suppression to the upcoming 2020 U.S. presidential elections, said Stacy Abrams, a former Georgia gubernational candidate.
“Hostile foreign powers, we know, are using social media platforms to undermine our elections, to sow discourse, confuse voters and to try to derail the process as we saw in 2016,” she said.
Ms. Abrams, former Democratic leader of the Georgia House of Representatives and founder of Fair Fight, an organization that combats voter suppression and defends voting rights, called for immediate action on the part of social media companies to curtain inauthentic accounts and the amplification of election-related misinformation on their platforms during reamarks at a virtual forum hosted Monday, June 29, by the George Washington University Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics, which is based in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences.