Social media firms remained on high alert Tuesday against Election Day misinformation and manipulation efforts as polling places began closing in the US and focus turned to tallying ballots.
Aiming to avoid the problems that occurred in the 2016 campaign, Facebook, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube were implementing policies aimed at heading off the spread of false information designed to sway the outcome of the election.
Facebook said it had activated a command center which was monitoring the platform in real time.
"Our Election Operations Center will continue monitoring a range of issues in real time -- including reports of voter suppression content," said a Facebook statement posted on Twitter.
Facebook said its election center was also tracking other issues such as the actions by supporters of President Donald Trump to surround campaign buses for Democrat Joe Biden.
However some groups at Facebook were being used to share stories of going to polling places without face masks to "scare liberals away," according to a post by Kayla Gogarty of nonprofit watchdog group Media Matters.
Meanwhile, a small group of Instagram users were shown a notice atop their feeds erroneously claiming "Tomorrow is Election Day," in what the photo-centric social network said was a glitch.
Instagram said that the notice was left over from a night earlier and wasn't cleared out of a memory cache unless the app was restarted.
And a #stopthesteal hashtag was being used on social media posts tailored to cast doubt on the voting process.
"This is a targeted disinformation campaign against Black voters and the platforms are not doing anything to shut that down," social analyst Shireen Mitchell.
Facebook reiterated that it would place warning labels on ..
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