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February 9, 2020 04:34 pm

Twitter and Facebook Criticized For Not Removing False Claims About Iowa Voters

What happened when conservative activist Tom Fitton issued an inaccurate press release last week about Iowa's voter registration rolls? After being debunked by Republican state officials -- and identified as "false" by the Associated Press -- the false claims simply remained on both Facebook and Twitter. The Associated Press reports:Fitton, founder of Judicial Watch, tweeted a report claiming that eight Iowa counties have more people registered to vote than are actually eligible to vote. [Republican] Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate moved quickly to counter the false information... Pate tweeted a link to the secretary of state's website, for those who wanted to check the numbers. "The county population numbers you claim are way too low. Dallas County's population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, is nearly 9,000+ more than you claim, and Johnson County's is nearly 7,000 higher," Pate tweeted. But the false information circulated Sunday and throughout the day on social media. One tweet was retweeted over 40,000 times. But according to another report, that was just the beginning...The claim was amplified on Twitter by Fox TV host Sean Hannity, a close confidant of President Donald Trump... Fitton admitted in an interview that he "used older statistics and census numbers to reach his conclusion," the Associated Press reported. Judicial Watch's posts were still on Twitter and Facebook as of Wednesday afternoon. A Twitter spokesperson said the Judicial Watch tweet was "not in violation of our election integrity policy as it does not suppress voter turnout or mislead people about when, where, or how to vote." Twitter last year banned political advertising on its platform. Facebook, which controversially allows politicians to lie in political ads, did not provide a response to this news organization's inquiry about the Judicial Watch post. Facebook's director of product management has said the firm does not fact-check political ads for truthfulness and that those ads should be regulated by the federal government, not social media companies. The Republican Secretary of State said in a statement that the false claims "erode voter confidence in elections."

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