Lies about the 2020 election led to a massive wave of political violence, threats, and harassment directed towards election officials and volunteer poll workers – the very people who are ensuring our elections run smoothly.

But this decision to roll back a commonsense policy against election lies shows that social media platforms like YouTube failed to learn from the 2020 elections – and are woefully unprepared to stop election deniers and disinformation..

It’s not just YouTube. Our Social Media Monitoring team spends every Election Day tracking blatant, evidence-free attempts to convince people their votes don’t count or that we can’t trust election officials – and raises them to social media platform officials to delete.

But the response we’ve received hasn’t been enough. We, along with 120 other groups, called on social media platforms before the 2022 elections to make specific policy changes to help moderate election lies. Instead, they’ve continued allowing harmful content to continue to spread – to say nothing of right-wing sites like Gab and Parler that are designed to spread disinformation.

Social media platforms cannot continue to put profit over corporate responsibility and democracy itself. We must send a clear message that consumers – and our democracy – deserve better from our social media platforms.