Some tech companies are eager to tell everyone about their work around the midterms. Others are taking a quieter approach.

Twitter and Google are getting ready for the upcoming elections. Google is making changes to Gmail, and Twitter’s ready to fight election misinformation.

• Twitter said yesterday that it’s reviving tools to take down false and misleading election posts. It’s also applying its civic integrity policy, introduced in 2018 to stop users from posting misleading claims about elections, to the midterms.
• Google’s trying to make sure campaign emails stay out of your spam folder after it was criticized for marking too many Republican campaign emails as spam.

Meta is mostly keeping quiet and hasn’t shared anything other than this one-page outline.

• That’s quite different from how it approached the 2018 election, when the company offered tours of its election response war room.
• Two New York University researchers, one of whom planned to investigate the spread of disinformation around the Jan. 6 insurrection, had their access to Facebook revoked by Meta.
• Meta’s also sunsetting CrowdTangle, its tool used for fact-checking and research, and the number of people working on the company’s core election team has dwindled.
• “They’re not talking about it,” former Facebook policy director Katie Harbath told The AP. “Best case scenario: They’re still doing a lot behind the scenes. Worst case scenario: They pull back, and we don’t know how that’s going to manifest itself for the midterms on the platforms.”

It remains to be seen whether Meta has something more up its sleeves, or if it’s taking itself out of the elections narrative. If it plays out anything like the 2020 elections, though, even if companies set up the most stringent protections and talk about them at every opportunity, they might find themselves face-to-face with lawmakers anyway.

— Sarah Roach