With under three weeks to go until November 4, EIP has updated its social media platform policy analysis post to account for substantial changes made by the platforms in the past 2 months. Since first publishing this post in August 2020, we have seen constructive policy updates from Facebook (Instagram), Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok and Nextdoor. We evaluate these new policies against our 4 categories of election integrity. We’ve also updated the post to test these policies against scenarios of potential confrontations at polling stations, which represent difficult scenarios platforms may face in real time.

Thirty days out from the U.S. presidential election, platform policies intended to identify state-media influence operations are quickly evolving. However, there is a significant gap between platforms’ policy language and actual policy implementation. In order to evolve effectively, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube must fully implement terms of use policies governing how, why, and when labels are appended to foreign state-controlled media accounts, pages, and posts. Because of previous state-controlled media involvement in U.S. elections, it is critical that their capacity to create and spread disinformation is diminished to the fullest extent possible. 

This blog post builds on the foundational work of other scholars to focus specifically on three key components of digital political advertising: the review process for political ads, platforms’ transparency for information about those ads, and unique loopholes for different types of speakers running political ads. Regarding the last component, recent investigations by EIP have found loopholes in Google’s advertising policy that are cause for concern. We end with a series of recommendations to help address some gaps we highlight in our analysis.