As U.S. President Donald Trump and his allies flooded social media on Wednesday with false claims of victory and unsupported allegations of voter fraud, social media companies warned users the presidential election had yet to be decided.
The posts on Twitter, Facebook and other sites are imposing a real-time test of Silicon Valley's much-touted rules on handling election misinformation and premature claims of victory.
But it is not clear whether the disclaimers and fact-checks, which often occur well after posts have been shared tens of thousands of times, are curbing the circulation of baseless claims. And in the case of Facebook, staff rewrote some of their rules on the fly.