The more things change …

There was a brief point in time when it almost looked like tech platforms were going to emerge from the 2020 U.S. election unscathed. They’d spent years nursing their wounds from 2016 and building sturdy defenses against future attacks. So when Election Day came and went without some obvious signs of foreign interference or outright civil war, tech leaders and even some in the tech press considered it a win.

One year ago today, it became clear those declarations of victory were as premature as President Trump’s. Plenty has been written about Big Tech’s failures in the lead up to the riot. The question now is: What’s changed in a year, and what impact, if any, have those changes had on the spread of election lies and domestic extremism?

The most immediate impact of the riot was that it revealed room for exceptions to tech platforms’ most rigid rules.

• Trump’s suspension was a watershed moment, indicating a new willingness among these platforms to actually enforce their existing rules against high-profile violators.
• Up until that time, platforms had rules on the books but somehow always found ways to justify why Trump wasn’t running afoul of them.
• “Since Jan. 6, the major platforms — I’m thinking particularly of Twitter and Facebook — have grown much more willing to enforce existing policies against powerful political figures,” said Daniel Kreiss, a professor at University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media.

Other work that began even before Jan. 6 took on new urgency after the riot.

• Facebook stopped recommending political and civic groups after internal investigations found that the vast majority of the most active groups were cesspools of hate, misinformation and harassment.
• Facebook also said late last January that it was considering reducing political content in the News Feed, a test that has only expanded since then.

Platforms also started taking a more expansive view of what constitutes harm, looking beyond the Russian troll farms of old and focusing also on networks of real users who wreak havoc without trying to mask their identities.

• In January of last year, Twitter wiped out 70,000 QAnon-linked accounts under a relatively new policy that forbids “coordinated harmful activity.”
• Facebook wrestled with this question, too, in an internal report on its role in the riot. “What do we do when a movement is authentic, coordinated through grassroots or authentic means, but is inherently harmful and violates the spirit of our policy?” wrote the authors of the report, first published by BuzzFeed.

The answers to those questions are still far from decided. So is the question of whether any of these tweaks and changes mattered — and whether it was naive to ever believe they could.

• The great deplatforming of 2021 only prompted a “great scattering” of extremist groups to other alternative platforms, according to one Atlantic Council report.
• Steve Bannon’s War Room channel may have gotten yanked from YouTube and his account may have been banned from Twitter, but his extremist views have continued unabated on his podcast and on his website where he’s been able to rake in money from Google ads.
• Deplatforming can also create a measurable backlash effect. One recent report on Parler activity leading up to the riot found that users who had been deplatformed elsewhere wore it like a badge of honor on Parler, which only mobilized them further.

Tech giants have had plenty to make up for this last year. But ultimately, there’s only so much they can change at a time when some estimates suggest about a quarter of Americans believe the 2020 election was stolen and some 21 million Americans believe use of force would be justified to restore Trump as president.

They believe that not just because of what they see on social media, but because of what the political elites and elected officials in their party are saying on a regular basis. “The biggest thing that hasn’t changed is the trajectory of the growing extremism of one of the two major U.S. political parties,” Kreiss said. “Platforms are downstream of a lot of that, and until that changes, we’re not going to be able to create new policies out of that problem.”

— Issie Lapowsky (email | twitter)

A version of this story first appeared on Protocol.com. Read it here.

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A MESSAGE FROM ZOOM

While we were all Zooming, the Zoom team was thinking ahead and designing new offerings that could continue to enable seamless collaboration, communication and connectivity while evolving with the shifting workplace culture. Protocol sat down with Yuan to talk about Zoom's evolution, the future of work and the Zoom products he's most excited about.

Learn more