DISINFO WARS

Twitter Boosts Rules on Misinformation Ahead of 2020 Election

The company will add fact-check labels or hide tweets that contain false or misleading information.

Social-media behemoth Twitter, a longtime home for election-meddling bots and trolls, rolled out an expanded policy towards misleading, false, and unverified information on Thursday in advance of the 2020 presidential election. The company fact-checked President Trump for the first time in May, but has since only rarely applied fact-check labels to the president’s tweets. Starting next week, the company plans to label or remove false information “intended to undermine public confidence in an election or other civic process,” a category many of the president’s tweets are largely considered to fall into. Twitter says it is expanding its policy due to “the changing circumstances of how people will vote in 2020,” referring to the pandemic-induced shift to vote by mail. According to its new official policy, it will ban “misleading claims about the results,” prematurely calling elections before official results have been released, or “inciting unlawful conduct” to disrupt transfer of power.