Fixing election interference, safeguarding election integrity? Developments and dynamics of election-related policies on social media platforms

Platforms are key intermediaries of public and political communication, both heralded as facilitators of bottom-up democracy and condemned as democracy’s greatest danger. From misinformation to hate speech to election integrity concerns, the perils of platforms have become obvious in recent years, and platforms have increasingly developed rules and processes to handle problematic content. Elections are a catalyst for this development as both moments of peak attention on platforms’ roles in democracy and of vulnerability to political interference. In this paper, we identify and compare election-related policies on key social media platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and TikTok), and examine their changes over time. We identify an early phase addressing threats to concrete election-related processes and persons (2018–2020), a much more political phase taking their roles as hosts of public conversation seriously and affirming responsibility for the integrity of civic processes (2020–2022), and a more recent phase of profound backlash (since 2022). Contextualizing these phases, we assume that general dynamics in discourses about the responsibility of platforms, as well as specific election-related developments, most notably US elections 2016–2024, explain these changes.