Twitter announced several user-interaction updates that will go into effect ahead of Election Day, including additional “friction” in the retweeting process in an attempt to limit the spread of misleading information.
Beginning Oct. 20, Twitter will automatically prompt users to turn every retweet into a quote tweet.
“People who go to Retweet will be brought to the Quote Tweet composer where they’ll be encouraged to comment before sending their Tweet,” legal lead Vijaya Gadde and product lead Kayvon Beykpour wrote in a blog post on Friday. “Though this adds some extra friction for those who simply want to Retweet, we hope it will encourage everyone to not only consider why they are amplifying a Tweet, but also increase the likelihood that people add their own thoughts, reactions and perspectives to the conversation.”
Testing for that function will begin “for some people” on Friday.
Twitter will also add roadblocks for users who try to retweet information that “violate our policies against misleading information about civic integrity, COVID-19, and synthetic and manipulated media,” the blog post said. Before being allowed to retweet those posts, users will be met with a prompt that leads them to “credible information about the topic before they are able to amplify it.”
In addition, Gadde and Beykpour announced additional warnings that will be added to tweets that have been labeled misleading from political figures and accounts with more than 100,000 followers and to tweets that obtain “significant engagement.” Before a user is able to share a “misleading” tweet in any of those categories, he or she must first click through a series of warnings and will only be able to quote the tweet to share.
A representative for Twitter told the Washington Examiner, “Our teams work diligently to investigate attempts to artificially amplify the conversation and will take action in line with the Twitter Rules if Tweets and/or accounts are found to be in violation.”
Twitter’s newest attempts at decelerating how quickly information is spread across Twitter follow updates in September to the social media platform that revamped how it addresses and labels misinformation.
The new approach emphasizes presenting misleading tweets with more context, according to a blog post from Twitter’s safety team. Twitter said it will refrain from determining “the truthfulness of Tweets” and will provide additional information “to help people make up their own minds” when the accuracy of the content is called into question.
Specifically concerning Election Day, Twitter said that it will label or remove tweets that are false, misleading, or “intended to undermine public confidence in an election or other civic process,” according to its updated civic integrity policy. Twitter will remove any tweets that “encourage others to interfere with the election process.”
“The prompt to Quote Tweet instead of Retweet, meant to encourage people to add their own commentary, will begin October 20 and extend through at least the end of Election week in the US,” the Twitter representative said.
Tweets which include premature claims of a victory in an election will be labeled and direct people to our official US Election page in Explore.
Tweets that encourage others to interfere with the election process or the results will be removed.https://t.co/dDms913BHt
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) October 9, 2020
Both the Friday announcement and September blog post emphasize that tweets labeled as misleading or disputed will “have reduced visibility across the service,” but users will still be able to see and retweet the posts.
“In serving the public conversation, our goal is to make it easy to find credible information on Twitter and to limit the spread of potentially harmful and misleading content,” the Twitter representative said.
