Twitter, a social networking service, says it flagged approximately 300,000 “potentially misleading” tweets on the US elections between October 27 and November 11, 2020.
This was disclosed in a statement by Vijaya Gadde, legal, policy and trust and safety lead at Twitter, and Kayvon Beykpour, product lead, on Thursday.
On November 7, tweets by US President Donald Trump alleging that thousands of illegal votes were received on election day after 8pm were labelled as “misleading” by Twitter.
According to the statement, the decision to label tweets is part of Twitter’s efforts to discourage the spread of misleading information.
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The social media giant said it has implemented the approach on tweets about COVID-19, fake news and the 2020 US election that could contribute to offline harm.
“In the months leading up to election day, we announced a set of policy, enforcement and product changes to add context, encourage thoughtful consideration, and reduce the potential for misleading information to spread on Twitter,” the statement read.
“We continue to apply labels to add context and limit the risk of harmful election misinformation spreading without important context.
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“Approximately 300,000 tweets have been labelled under our civic integrity policy for content that was disputed and potentially misleading. These represent 0.2 percent of all US election-related tweets sent during this time period.”
Twitter added that it will publish a comprehensive report on the 2020 US election in early 2021.
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