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Global Voices
Global Voices
Kenya election posters. Image by Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, March 4, 2013. (CC BY-SA 2.0) In Africa, social media companies like Twitter and Facebook place more urgency on developing new products or fixing bugs in existing products than on developing comprehensive strategies and tools to combat harmful and false information shared through their social media platforms during democratic elections. In 2020, Nu Wexler, a former Twitter’s policy communications team lead, described elections in the United States as “the Super Bowl.” On the other hand, Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, hinted …