By Sheila Dang
(Reuters) – Twitter Inc will revive features on the social media site to promote accurate information about November’s U.S. midterm elections and crack down on false and misleading posts, the company said in a blog post on Thursday.
Civil rights and online disinformation experts have accused social media and technology platforms of not doing enough to prevent the spread of misinformation, including the idea that President Joe Biden did not win the 2020 election.
Twitter will implement its civic integrity policy, introduced in 2018, in the Nov. 8 midterm elections, when all 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are at stake and about a third of the 100 seats in the Senate. of the USA.
The policy prohibits users from posting misleading content intended to dissuade people from voting and claims intended to undermine public confidence in the election, including false information about the outcome of the election.
Twitter permanently suspended Donald Trump from the service last year, citing the risk of “further inciting violence” days after supporters of the then-president stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The San Francisco-based company, which is suing billionaire Elon Musk to block his $44 billion deal to buy the company, said it conducted tests to prevent misleading posts from being recommended to other users through notifications.
The tests resulted in 1.6 million fewer views of misleading information per month, Twitter said.
Efforts to combat disinformation, such as those during the 2020 presidential election, include information in users’ timelines to “pre-empt,” that is, debunk lies before they spread further online.
(Reporting by Sheila Dang in Dallas; Editing by Howard Goller)
