Twitter imposes restrictions, more warning labels ahead of U.S. election

Post author:Srishti Pandey
Post published:October 10, 2020

Twitter said it would add more warnings and restrictions on tweets with misleading information labels from US political figures like candidates and campaigns.

Twitter Inc said on Friday it will remove tweets calling for people to interfere with the U.S. election process or implementation of election results, including through violence, as the company also announced more restrictions to slow the spread of misinformation.

Twitter said in a blog post that, from next week, users will get a prompt pointing them to credible information before they can retweet content that has been labeled as misleading.

It said it would add more warnings and restrictions on tweets with misleading information labels from U.S. political figures like candidates and campaigns, as well as U.S.-based accounts with more than 100,000 followers or that get “significant engagement.”

Twitter says it has labeled thousands of misleading posts, though most attention has been on the labels applied to tweets by U.S. President Donald Trump. Twitter also said it would label tweets that falsely claim a win for any candidate.

The company announced several temporary steps to slow amplification of content: for example, from Oct. 20 to at least the end of the U.S. election week, global users pressing “retweet” will be directed first to the “quote tweet” button to encourage people to add their own commentary.

It will also stop surfacing trending topics without added context, and will stop people seeing “liked by” recommendations from people they do not know in their timeline.

On Wednesday, Facebook said it would ban calls for poll watching using “militarized language.”