Hashtag Appears Spread US Election Conspiracy Theory, Facebook And TikTok Take Action

Illustration (Photo: Antara)

JAKARTA - Facebook and TikTok have blocked hashtags or hashtags used to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories about the presidential election.

The hashtags generally revolve around the baseless claim that Democrats are trying to manipulate the election to beat President Trump, quoted in The Verge, Saturday.

On Facebook, hashtags that were blocked include #stopthesteal, which has been used widely to make unfounded election manipulation claims by Democrats, and #sharpiegate, which falsely alleges that the use of the Sharpie marker led to Trump's vote uncountable in Arizona.

Meanwhile, TikTok blocks #sharpiegate, #stopthesteal, and the more general term #riggedelection.

While Twitter doesn't appear to be blocking any election conspiracy theory hashtags, the social media company has added a warning label to some of its tweets, suggesting they may contain inaccurate information.

Other tweets were marked with messages encouraging readers to learn more about election security efforts.

This moderation of hashtags that focuses on conspiracy theories is part of a wider effort by social media platforms this week to quickly remove misinformation surrounding the election.

Twitter has aggressively labeled Trump's tweets making baseless or false claims about how the election totals were counted.

Facebook has added a similar label, and has blocked a group of 300,000 people named "Stop the Steal." Facebook also said it was "seeing worrying calls for violence from members of the group."

TikTok says blocking these hashtags is part of "normal moderation and an approach to misinformation, hate speech and other content that violates our guidelines."

"Both hashtags have been removed because" content with this hashtag often violates our misleading information policy, "a TikTok spokesperson said as quoted by Antara from The Verge.

Twitter has been proactively monitoring the #StopTheSteal hashtag and related Tweets since Tuesday, November 3 and continues to do so, a spokesperson told The Verge.

Twitter doesn't normally block hashtags, but it does prevent hashtags that violate the company's content policies from trending.