Twitter is going to crack down on the spread of fake news about the US presidential election. It is temporarily made more difficult for users to make fake news messages go viral.
There will be some big changes starting October 20, the company says. The first change is that users cannot just message other people about the elections retweet. A user will be prompted to add their own comment or context before the post can be shared.
Twitter also disables the system that suggests messages based on users’ interest and activity around accounts they follow. Users’ timelines will only show messages from accounts they actually follow.
And if people try to distribute content that Twitter has flagged as false, they will receive a warning that they are about to share false information. There will also be additional warnings and restrictions for misleading tweets from politicians and campaign teams, and for US accounts that have more than 100,000 followers.
Warning labels, also for Trump
The American company has previously tightened its policy against messages intended to undermine confidence in the American election. False claims about an election winner are labeled. Calls to influence election results and incentives for violence are removed.
Thousands of tweets have recently been labeled with a warning label, including messages from President Trump. This happened, for example, with his comment that voting by post leads to fraud, without arguing for it.
Trump posted this tweet in May. Twitter added a label with a reference to more information: