The social media company said it will apply its civic
integrity policy, introduced in 2018, to the November 8 midterms, when numerous
US Senate and House of Representatives seats will be up for election. The
policy relies on labelling or removing posts with misleading content, focused
on messages intended to stop voting or claims intended to undermine public
confidence in an election.
In a statement, Twitter said it has taken numerous steps in
recent months to "elevate reliable resources" about primaries and
voting processes. Applying a label to a tweet also means the content is not
recommended or distributed to more users.
The San Francisco-based company is currently in a legal
battle with billionaire Elon Musk over his attempt to walk away from his $44
billion deal to acquire Twitter.
Musk has called himself a "free speech
absolutist," and has said Twitter posts should only be removed if there is
illegal content, a view supported by many in the tech industry.
But civil rights and online misinformation experts have long
accused social media and tech platforms of not doing enough to prevent the
spread of false content, including the idea that President Joe Biden did not
win the 2020 election.
They warn that misinformation could be an even greater
challenge this year, as candidates who question the 2020 election are running
for office, and divisive rhetoric is spreading following an FBI search of
former President Donald Trump's Florida home earlier this week.
"We're seeing the same patterns playing out," said
Evan Feeney, deputy senior campaign director at Color of Change, which
advocates for the rights of Black Americans.
In the blog post, Twitter said a test of redesigned labels
saw a decline in users' retweeting, liking, and replying to misleading content.
Researchers say Twitter and other platforms have a spotty
record in consistently labelling such content.
In a paper published last month, Stanford University
researchers examined a sample of posts on Twitter and Meta's Facebook that
altogether contained 78 misleading claims about the 2020 election. They found
that Twitter and Facebook consistently applied labels to only about 70 percent
of the claims.
In a statement, Twitter said it has taken numerous steps in
recent months to "elevate reliable resources" about primaries and
voting processes.
Twitter's efforts to fight misinformation during the
midterms will include information prompts to debunk falsehoods before they
spread widely online.
More emphasis should be placed on removing false and
misleading posts, said Yosef Getachew, media and democracy program director at
nonpartisan group Common Cause.
"Pointing them to other sources isn't enough," he
said.
Experts also questioned Twitter's practice of leaving up
some tweets from world leaders in the name of public interest.
"Twitter has a responsibility and ability to stop
misinformation at the source," Feeney said, saying that world leaders and
politicians should face a higher standard for what they tweet.
Twitter leads the industry in releasing data on how its
efforts to intervene against misinformation are working, said Evelyn Douek, an
assistant professor at Stanford Law School who studies online speech
regulation.
Yet more than a year after soliciting public input on what
the company should do when a world leader violates its rules, Twitter has not
provided an update, she said. © Reuters
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