Roommates, Twitter is officially cracking down on the continuous spread of false information—-specifically from the likes of Trump and his cohorts. Twitter just unveiled a collection of new updates, including efforts to slow retweets with misleading information from going viral, which is an attempt to curb the spread of misinformation on the platform ahead of Election Day on November 3rd.
Twitter also made it very clear that it would not allow any people on Twitter, including candidates for office, to claim an election win before it was “authoritatively called.” “To determine the results of an election in the U.S., we require either an announcement from state election officials, or a public projection from at least two authoritative, national news outlets that make independent election calls,” the company’s legal, policy, trust and safety lead Vijaya Gadde and product lead Kayvon Beykpour wrote. “Tweets which include premature claims will be labeled and direct people to our official US election page.”
Additionally, users will not be able to retweet or reply to tweets “with a misleading information label from U.S. political figures (including candidates and campaign accounts), U.S.-based accounts with more than 100,000 followers, or that obtain significant engagement.” Users will, however, be able to quote-tweet the messages, although they will have to click through a warning in order to see these labeled tweets in the first place.
Also, when it comes to slowing misinformation spread by retweets, starting next week, when a user tries to retweet a message labeled to have violated Twitter’s “policies against misleading information about civic integrity, COVID-19, and synthetic and manipulated media,” a prompt will show up “pointing them to credible information about the topic before they are able to amplify” the original misleading tweet.
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