How to read your social media feeds on Election Day

Voters in the U.S. who go on Twitter, TikTok, Facebook or other platforms to learn about Tuesday's pivotal U.S. midterm elections are likely to encounter rumors, hearsay and misinformation.

There's also a lot of useful information on social media, including authoritative results from election officials, the latest news about candidates and races, and the perspectives of the voters casting ballots.

Here are some tips for navigating social media on Election Day — and in the days or weeks that follow.

MISHAPS WILL HAPPEN. IT DOESN'T MEAN THERE IS FRAUD

Elections are run by humans, and mistakes are unavoidable. Yet, stripped of context, stories of irregularities at polling places and election offices can be used as evidence of widespread fraud.

And with so much happening on Election Day, election workers, local officials and even the media can have little time to push back on such claims before they go viral.

In Georgia in 2020, a water leak at a site where ballots were being counted was used to spin a far-fetched tale of ballot rigging. In Arizona, the choice of pens given to voters filling out ballots led to similarly preposterous claims.

Neither incident affected the results, yet both continue to show up in misleading posts as evidence of fraud.

“The internet allows people to create their own evidence from scratch, and then spread it to millions of others,” said John Jackson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. “That doesn't mean their evidence means anything, but it does mean that we all have to be better at evaluating what they're saying.”

KNOW YOUR BLIND SPOTS

Misinformation thrives when people are looking for information to explain something they don't understand. That creates a big opportunity for those looking to...