The US midterms are coming up and therefore Twitter is once again thrown into the limelight. Is it a place where democracy is made or destroyed? It depends on who you talk to. And that is likely to be the case for Twitter’s latest feature: election integrity features.
The first is Twitter’s Civic Integrity Policy, which allows the platform to limit the spread of misleading tweets. They do this with a series of tweet labels that were launched last November and have seen positive results.
As explained by Twitter: “The Civic Integrity Policy covers the most common types of harmful misleading information about elections and civic events, such as: claims about how to participate in a civic process like how to vote, misleading content intended to intimidate or dissuade people from participating in the election, and misleading claims intended to undermine public confidence in an election – including false information about the outcome of the election. Tweets with this content may be labelled with links to credible information or helpful context, and Twitter will not recommend or amplify this content in areas of the product where Twitter makes recommendations.”
And then there are ‘prebunks’ which offer context on potentially misleading election trends.
“Over the coming months, we’ll place prompts directly on people’s timelines in the US and in Search when people type related terms, phrases, or hashtags.”
If there was an election won by Twitter, Twitter wants nothing to do with another term.
