There is nothing normal about 2020: a global pandemic, deadly wildfires, Harry and Meghan quitting the royal family, murder hornets. Not to mention a tense presidential election expected to culminate sometime this week with the counting of record numbers of votes.
Due to high volumes of mail-in ballots, some state results will not be resolved on election night, so social networks are taking extra precautions to curb misinformation.
“We are taking additional steps to provide context when results have not been officially called,” Twitter wrote in a Monday blog update. “We believe this is the right thing to do to protect the integrity of the conversation around the election while counting is ongoing and before results are announced by state authorities.”
Now through Inauguration Day, the company will label some tweets that “make claims about election results”—prioritizing the presidential ticket and other highly contested races “where there may be significant issues with misleading information,” Twitter said.
All accounts with US 2020 candidate labels (including US 2020 Presidential candidate and campaign accounts) are eligible for labeling, as are US-based accounts with more than 100,000 followers and tweets that have more than 25,000 likes, quote tweets, or retweets.
A handful of news outlets—ABC News, Associated Press, CBS News, CNN, Decision Desk HQ, Fox News, National Election Pool, NBC News, Reuters—are exempt from Twitter’s stamp of disapproval.
Last week, Twitter unveiled a new campaign to counter misinformation with red, white, and blue prompts warning that a lag in official election results could lead to “unconfirmed claims” that a candidate won their presidential, congressional, or gubernatorial race.
President Trump, meanwhile, had another one of his tweets fact-checked on the eve of Election Day. This one questioned the Supreme Court’s decision to allow votes to be counted in Pennsylvania beyond Nov. 3. This is not out of the ordinary, but Trump baselessly claimed the decision would “induce violence in the streets.”
