The Year That Changed the Internet

For years, social-media platforms had held firm: Just because a post was false didn’t mean it was their place to do anything about it. But 2020 changed their minds.

At the end of May, Twitter for the first time a tweet from the president of the United States as . After Donald Trump falsely insisted that mail-in voting would rig the November election, the platform added a message telling users to “get the facts.” Within a day, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, had appeared to reassure viewers that Facebook had “a different policy” and believed strongly that tech companies shouldn’t be arbiters of truth of what people say online. But come November, between the time polls closed and the race was called for Biden, much of Trump’s Facebook page, as well as of Trump’s Twitter feed, was plastered with warning labels and fact-checks, a striking visual manifestation of the way that. Now it’s entirely unremarkable.