As we approach the one-year mark on the COVID-19 pandemic, Prof. Trisha Meyer and Alexandre Alaphilippe (EU Disinfolab) take a close look at how online platforms responded to health and political disinformation on their services in 2020.
- We publish two detailed timelines of Facebook, Google, TikTok and Twitter’s responses to COVID-19 and US elections related disinformation: with the data organised per platform and per response type.
- Online platforms heavily emphasize amplification of credible COVID-19 related information of the World Health Organization and other public health authorities, including through provision of free advertising space
- They also rapidly and regularly expanded their policies, especially on Misleading and Harmful Content, to ban, remove, demote or label harmful but not illegal disinformation
- In 2020 the role of online platforms in content curation became visible as never before. Their ability to react quickly is both encouraging and worrying, if not accompanied by a known hierarchy of principles and stringent transparency and review measures
