As social media’s influence over politics and elections has risen, so too has our collective anxiety about it. Over the last three years in particular, the use of megaplatforms like Facebook and Twitter as vectors for misinformation has been the subject of congressional hearings and not a few columns on the websites of some of our finer magazines. And as we gear up for elections in 2019 — and, assuming we make it through this year, in 2020 — the anxiety is gearing up, too. On Monday, in anticipation of the European Parliamentary elections in May, the Mozilla Foundation, an influential internet-advocacy non-profit, released an open letter to Facebook, co-signed by 32 civil rights and transparency groups, demanding that the social network implement measures designed to increase transparency, facilitate research, and combat misinformation. “We … are deeply concerned,” the letter begins, “about the validity of Facebook’s promises to protect European users from targeted disinformation campaigns during the European Parliamentary elections.”
[…]
Source: What — and Who — Should We Be Afraid of on Social Media?