For months, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube prepared to clamp down on misinformation on Election Day in the U.S.
On Tuesday, most of their plans went off without a hitch. The social platforms added labels to misleading posts by President Donald Trump and notified their users that there was no immediate outcome to the presidential race. On television, news anchors even cited fact-checks similar to those made by Twitter and Facebook.
Then came Wednesday. With ballots still being counted and the absence of a clear result, the flow of misinformation shifted away from seeding doubts about the vote to false claims of victory. Twitter rapidly labeled several tweets by Trump over the course of the day as being misleading about the result of his race and also did the same to tweets from others in his circle, such as Eric Trump and the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany. And Facebook and YouTube used their homepages to show people accurate information about the election.