While the 2020 presidential election presents an array of challenges for Twitter, blocking attempts to manipulate voters chief among them, CEO Jack Dorsey also anticipates a tremendous opportunity.
The San Francisco-based social media company has become a nexus for political discussion, driven in part by a chief executive with 62 million followers who uses the platform as none of his predecessors have, and the increasing reliance on it by congressional lawmakers and even local politicians.
“We do see, obviously, a lot of conversation around news and politics, around the Democratic debates, and we believe that Twitter has an important role to carry these conversations and to help learn about what’s unfolding within other countries,” Dorsey told analysts and investors after the company reported second-quarter earnings on Friday.
An integral part of Twitter’s work, he said, will be flagging and eliminating misleading information like the posts from Russian agents that permeated American social media during the 2016 campaign, prompting numerous investigations and congressional hearings.
“Our No. 1 priority within elections and conversations on the elections,” Dorsey said, “is making sure we’re protecting the integrity of the conversation.” That requires “identifying forms of manipulation used to amplify misleading information,” he said, as well as increasing transparency around ad purchases and targeting.
Facebook, which like Twitter has been at the forefront of the election debate, continues to invest heavily in preventing voter manipulation, too, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this week.
The Menlo Park, California-based social media giant, which reaches an audience of 2.7 billion people a month, relies on a combination of software and staff to identify and analyze misleading posts. It has also developed ad-transparency tools that let users determine who paid for political ads and what promotions the buyer has supported in the past.
During the 2018 midterm elections in the U.S., Zuckerberg set up a “war room’ to flag problems in real time, and recent votes in Indian and the European Union “show that our efforts are working,” he told investors on Wednesday.
“We’ll continue building on these efforts as we approach the 2020 U.S. election to make sure we stay ahead,” Zuckerberg said. “Our adversaries are continually getting more sophisticated.”
It was a warning former special counselor Robert Mueller underscored in testimony to two House panels this week covering his investigation into whether the Kremlin worked with the Trump campaign in 2016.
While the two-year review uncovered no proof of conspiracy, Mueller pointed out that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government and those of other U.S. foes are already engaged in attempts to manipulate the 2020 vote.
“It wasn’t a single attempt,” Mueller said of Russia’s influence campaign in 2016. “They’re doing it as we sit here. They expect to do it again in the next campaign.”
Trump, who has repeatedly declared that the Mueller report exonerated him, has said he believes Putin’s statements that Russia didn’t interfere. At the same time, the president has described news media coverage of the investigation as “fake news” and focused instead on his perception of social media bias.
Not only has Trump summoned Dorsey to an Oval Office meeting to lay out his concerns, he also pulled a variety of conservative social media activists into a White House summit this month. In May, the White House turned to Twitter to collect stories about partisan posts removed from Twitter itself or Silicon Valley rivals such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
Dorsey and other Silicon Valley executives, meanwhile, have denied partisan content censorship, pointing out that their business model relies on expanding audiences rather than narrowing them.
Twitter has, however, set up a new warning label for tweets from government officials that break its rules. While the policy never mentioned Trump by name, it described a narrow group of government officials whose posts may be left on the site even if they violate its policies, which ban behavior including harassment and election interference, because being able to access the content is in the public’s interest.
In such cases, the platform will cover the tweet with a notice alerting users that the post violates company policies and offer them the option of looking anyway, if they want.
“We have been doubling our efforts to make sure that we can address all the issues that we’re seeing on the service,” Dorsey said Friday. “A big focus for us over the past year has been to proactively identify content on Twitter that would violate our rules, so that we don’t require a report.” Older systems at the company relied on users — often victims — to flag content violations, he noted.
Removing misleading content and blocking harassing or threatening posts is vital to the platform’s long-term growth, Dorsey added. “There will always be changing dynamics that we need to address, but we are getting better and better at recognizing them faster and more than anything else, being able to act on them faster.”
