How Twitter Fights Mistrust and Misinformation
Twitter took steps to slow the way information flows on its network, even changing some of its most basic features, as alarm grows that lies and calls for violence will sweep through social media in the weeks surrounding the presidential election. This has changed the feel of tweeting. What twitter decided to do:
Timeouts before retweeting from another account
Sharing false information flagged by Twitter will warn the user beforehand
Twitter added warning labels to lies that elected officials posted
Most of the changes would be temporary Twitter said
Example:
How this has effected the 2020 campaign
Twitter executives said these changes will help make users think before tweeting their thoughts. These changes believe to have come from Trump’s activity after returning from the hospital and tweeting nonstop. The Trump campaign said that these changes are a “extremely dangerous to our democracy”. Samantha Zager the deputy national press secretary for the Trump campaign, said that “the unelected liberal coastal elites of Silicon Valley are once again attempting to influence this election in favor of their preferred ticket by silencing the President and his supporters”. Biden’s campaign did not comment. Twitter’s changes for the 2020 election were way more aggressive than the other social platforms.
Twitter disabled the program that suggests posts on someone’s interests and the accounts they follow. Instead they will only see content from accounts they follow and ads. Vanita Gupta, the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said Twitter should make these changes permanent. Twitter almost shut down their trending topics page, instead they will focus more on fact-checking and provide better context to topics that are trending in the United States. They have been slowly taking away parts of its service that have been used to spread false and misleading information. Twitter’s fact-checking has continued and they began adding context to its trending topics, giving people more information about why a topic is trending. Twitter plans to add context to all trending topics on the For You page for people in the United States.