On Election Day, Facebook and Twitter Did Better by Making Their Products Worse | The New York Times

That gust of wind you felt coming from Silicon Valley on Wednesday morning was the social media industry’s tentative sigh of relief.

For the last four years, executives at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media companies have been obsessed with a single, overarching goal: to avoid being blamed for wrecking the 2020 U.S. election, as they were in 2016, when Russian trolls and disinformation peddlers ran roughshod over their defenses.

So they wrote new rules. They built new products and hired new people. They conducted elaborate tabletop drills to plan for every possible election outcome. And on Election Day, they charged huge, around-the-clock teams with batting down hoaxes and false claims.

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