Last fall as Facebook geared up to fight misinformation related to the 2020 elections, residents of Sammamish, Washington, realized they already had a problem.
They were in the midst of a contentious city council election season, and misinformation was running rampant on the social media site. Some users spread false rumors about candidates’ positions on hot topics like development, while others created Facebook groups under misleading names in the guise of neutrality.
“It ended up becoming a misinformation fest Facebook election, where basically the side that can feed the most amount of negativity and misinformation on Facebook won,” said Lin Yang, a former journalist who had grown up in Sammamish and later moved back.
[…]