Donald Trump's Twitter Ban Showed Immediate Change in Misinformation Shared on Social Media

Following President Donald Trump's suspension from several social media sites — including Twitter — last week, online misinformation about election fraud plummeted 73 percent, according to research by Zigil Labs in a report cited by The Washington Post Saturday. The research published by the San Francisco analytics firm shows just how powerful tech companies' role in shaping the public debate is and preventing misinformation campaigns that played so heavily into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Following the ban of Trump and several of his close allies from social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Spotify and Shopify, among others, Zignal found false claims of election fraud dropped from 2.5 million mentions to 688,000 mentions. That drop-off came sharply after Twitter's ban of the president on Jan. 8, which the tech giant said was the result of his fomenting violence and violating its policies time and time again. Alongside Trump's ban was the scrubbing of more than 70,000 accounts affiliated with the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory belief system, which also played a major role in the Capitol attack.

Zignal also found the use of hashtags found prevalently during the Capitol riot also dropped significantly, including #FightforTrump, #HoldtheLine and #MarchforTrump, all of which dropped at least 95 percent. "Together, those actions will likely significantly reduce the amount of online misinformation in the near term," Kate Starbird, disinformation researcher at the University of Washington, told the Washington Post. "What happens in the long term is still up in the air."

While Twitter announced on Jan. 8 that the president would no longer be allowed to use its platform, Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said Trump would be banned at least until Wednesday's inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, and possibly "indefinitely." In a statement released Jan. 7, Zuckerberg said Facebook had allowed Trump to violate its policies for years "because we believe that the public has a right to the broadest possible access to political speech, even controversial speech." After the events of Jan. 6, however, "current context is now fundamentally different, involving use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government," he wrote.

The tech CEO continued, "We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great. Therefore, we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete."