It’s mid-August of an election year in America, which can only mean one thing: It’s time for every social media company to announce how it plans to combat whatever fresh hell November has in store. This week, it’s TikTok and Meta’s turn.

Both companies have recently faced bruising accusations of being asleep at the wheel with regard to election interference. Now, they’re working hard to explain why they’re more prepared for this election than they were for the last one. Which, if you recall the last one, is a pretty low bar.

Starting today, TikTok is launching its “election center,” where users can get “authoritative information” about the election in 45 languages. TikTok will add labels to all election-related posts — as well as to any videos from governments, politicians and political parties in the U.S. — directing people to the center.

• TikTok is also leaning heavily on fact-checkers and will prevent videos from showing up in For You recommendations while they’re being reviewed. If a video can’t be verified, TikTok will label it as such and serve users a warning screen before they try to share it.
• The company will also be rolling out educational tools for creators to teach them about its political ad policies. Of course, that may help with the influencers who don’t know any better. Not so much with the ones who already know they’re breaking the rules.

Meta, meanwhile, is banning new political ads the week of the election — again.

• Remember: In 2020, the company botched the rollout of this same policy, removing ads that had been approved and were running before the ban went into effect, leaving Democrats fuming. Then, it left the ban in place for weeks, stymying efforts to get out the vote in the Georgia runoff.
• This year, Meta’s giving political campaigns a little more notice and is limiting the ban to one week only.
• The company is also scaling back its 2020 push to label all election-related content and direct people to its election information center. “In the 2020 election cycle we received feedback from users that these labels were over-used,” Meta’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg wrote in a blog post yesterday. “So in the event that we do need to deploy them this time round our intention is to do so in a targeted and strategic way.”

What’s notable about these plans is that neither company’s approach is radically different than it was in 2020. They’re still relying mostly on fact-checking, labeling, friction and restrictions on political advertising.

That could mean a few things: Maybe the tech industry is finally growing up and converging on a common playbook of tools and standards that allow even a newcomer like TikTok to get caught up quickly. Maybe it’s just failing to imagine whatever threat is coming next. Or maybe it’s both.

— Issie Lapowsky