Social media has been making improvements in recent years to better address issues of misinformation and bias on its platforms, but they are not doing so as quickly as some had hoped.

With their disastrous handling of misinformation in the run-up to the 2016 election, users lost trust in the once-revered platforms. Now, with changes made in recent years to address those failures, these companies hope to restore that lost respect, even as they remain bastions of conspiracy theories and false narratives.

“The more time you spend on these platforms, the more legitimate these messages of propaganda and disinformation are going to seem to you,” said Marc Berkman, CEO of the Organization for Social Media Safety. “Because that’s where you invest your time, and where we invest our time becomes where we invest our trust.”

An explosive, ethically questionable story published by the New York Post about presidential candidate Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, began circulating online on October 14, but due to potential accuracy violations, both Twitter and Facebook independently decided to restrict the article’s distribution — banning users from sharing the link — until it had been reviewed by independent fact-checkers. In a relatively unusual move, the move marks a complete reversal from how social media platforms treated content just four years ago.