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The upcoming election is one of the most important in American history, so Twitter is doing its best to discourage political misinformation on its platform.
In an announcement made on Friday, Twitter’s legal department said it would make several enforcement updates “that will increase context and encourage more thoughtful consideration before Tweets are amplified.” Among those updates include people and/or candidates not being able to claim an election win before it is authoritatively called. Tweets meant to “incite interference with the election process or with the implementation of election results” will also be subject to removal.
The announcement states tweets containing “misleading information” about civic integrity, COVID-19, and synthetic and manipulated media will continue to be labeled as such. But, beginning next week, when folks attempt to retweet said tweets they will “see a prompt pointing them to credible information about the topic before they are able to amplify it.”
“In addition to these prompts, we will now add additional warnings and restrictions on Tweets with a misleading information label from US political figures (including candidates and campaign accounts), US-based accounts with more than 100,000 followers, or that obtain significant engagement. People must tap through a warning to see these Tweets, and then will only be able to Quote Tweet; likes, Retweets and replies will be turned off, and these Tweets won’t be algorithmically recommended by Twitter. We expect this will further reduce the visibility of misleading information, and will encourage people to reconsider if they want to amplify these Tweets,” the announcement adds.
Read the full stipulations here and chime in with your thoughts.
