Twitter today announced some additional measures it"s taking in order to "protect" the United States presidential elections, which are set to culminate tomorrow, November 3. The social network had already introduced a few measures in early October, which included pushing users to add context when retweeting other tweets, instead of simply spreading messages without context.
Today, these measures are expanding with a focus on the election results. Beginning on election night (tomorrow), Twitter will begin labeling tweets that make claims about the results of the election before the final results are in. The labels focus on the presidential elections and other "highly contested races", so you may not see them everywhere. This measure will be applied through the inauguration of the elects.
Twitter will be applying these labels to tweets from accounts that have U.S. 2020 candidate labels, which identify those running in any of the elections this year, as well as all accounts based in the United States that have more than 100,000 followers. Additionally, tweets that reach a high level of engagement - meaning over 25,000 likes, quote tweets, or retweets - will also be subject to labels.
Exempt from labels will be Twitter accounts from official sources, such as state election officials or news outlets with independent election decision desks. These include ABC News, Associated Press, CBS News, CNN, Decision Desk HQ, Fox News, and NBC News. These sources will also be considered when labeling potentially misleading tweets, so if a claim is challenged by these sources, a label will be applied to indicate that.
Major online platforms have taken a number of measures to help this year"s elections go smoothly, and many have also encouraged voters to register and vote. Hopefully, that means these companies will avoid being at the center election-related scandals, like Facebook"s Cambridge Analytica incident in 2016.