A growing fear heading into election night is that prolific tweeter Donald Trump might declare victory over Joe Biden even as mail-in votes are still being counted—and that others could spread misinformation about the results. On Thursday, Twitter announced sweeping policy changes in an attempt to remove or label any tweets containing inaccurate information regarding the upcoming election. In particular, notes Politico, the policies should ensure that no candidate can claim victory before all the votes have been tallied.
Along with flagging such premature declarations, the new rules, according to CNBC, will also label “tweets containing false or misleading information that cause confusion about the laws of the election or the officials executing those civic processes,” and “tweets with disputed claims, such as unverified information about election rigging, ballot tampering, vote tallying or the certification of election results.” Last week, Facebook announced its own measures to curb misinformation and imposed a ban on new political advertisements in the week leading up to the election. “In the final days of an election there may not be enough time to contest new claims,” Zuckerberg wrote on a post.
According to Twitter, the policies will be enforced next week and will be, “applied equally and judiciously for everyone.” (Trump has already had several of his tweets flagged by the site with the most recent being a call out encouraging voters to potentially cast their ballots twice on voting day.) The company’s election plans come as social media is sure to play a pivotal role in spreading election information—and potentially misinformation—and as political leaders call for additional transparency from influential tech companies. In June, Senators Brian Schatz and John Thune introduced the Platform Accountability and Consumer Transparency (PACT) Act, which called for social media platforms to be transparent about their fact-checking process. PACT argued that failure to reveal what was flagged or removed could leave companies like Facebook and Twitter vulnerable “to accusations of arbitrary enforcement or even bias.”
Earlier this year, the Trump campaign accused Twitter of “bias” after the site flagged one of their videos as “manipulated media,” and in a letter addressed to company CEO Jack Dorsey, Trump campaign chief operating officer Michael Glassner wrote, “In order for American elections to remain free and fair, it is critical that the Biden campaign be held to the same standard it is demanding apply to others.” More recently, Trump has lobbed attacks on the platform—on the platform. Trending topics, he tweeted last month, “are never a real Twitter Trending. It’s Twitter Executive’s Choice. Only negative on Republican voices, especially mine!”
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