Twitter Slows Down Retweets Ahead of U.S. Election--2nd Update
October 09 2020 - 3:34PM
Dow Jones News
By Georgia Wells
Twitter Inc. will make it harder for posts to go viral ahead of
the U.S. election, including by putting limits on how users can
retweet.
The moves unveiled Friday, which also include pointing users
viewing certain tweets to credible content, are among the boldest
yet for the social-media platform and are designed to slow the
spread of misinformation.
Where users previously hit a button to reshare, or "retweet,"
items, they will now be directed to a screen that will encourage
adding commentary before resharing posts. If users don't write
anything, their post will still appear as a traditional retweet --
but the change "adds some extra friction" in the process, according
to a company blog post.
Twitter will start experimenting with this change for some users
later on Friday and will roll it out to all users Oct. 20. The
change will last at least through the end of the week of the U.S.
election.
"We hope it will encourage everyone to not only consider why
they are amplifying a tweet, but also increase the likelihood that
people add their own thoughts," Twitter's legal, policy, trust and
safety head Vijaya Gadde and product lead Kayvon Beykpour wrote in
a blog post Friday.
Social-media companies have been scrambling to clamp down on
potential confusion and ways their platforms can be abused to
undermine the integrity of the political process in the U.S.
Facebook Inc. has said it would suspend all political
advertising after the polls close Nov. 3, something that other
platforms including Twitter and TikTok have already implemented,
and many platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, have taken
steps to ban QAnon, the fast-growing conspiracy movement.
Twitter has conducted prior experiments to encourage users to
read articles before sharing them on the site.
Additionally, Twitter plans to display a new prompt that
provides credible information when users attempt to retweet a post
that Twitter has identified as containing misleading information.
This change starts next week.
Twitter currently labels tweets that contain misleading
information about Covid-19 and U.S. elections, among other items.
Tweets that receive these labels are de-amplified in Twitter's
algorithm, and the company, in some cases, will remove these
tweets.
Twitter said Friday a subset of the tweets that receive
misinformation labels will be made harder for users to share and
feature a suggestion that users add their own context before
reposting them. These new warnings will apply to tweets that are
labeled as containing misinformation and posted by users who have
outsized influence on the platform, such as U.S. political figures
and U.S.-based users with more than 100,000 followers.
In a bid to slow the spread of tweets, the company is tweaking
its algorithm to stop tweets from appearing in feeds simply based
on the amount of likes they receive. Currently, the tweets that
users see are arranged via an algorithm that includes content from
accounts they follow as well as tweets that other users like.
Other changes are designed to add more context rather than slow
the spread of content. Twitter said it will only surface topics in
its personalized trending topics tab for users in the U.S. if they
include an explanation. This change will require Twitter's curators
to review the trending topics more closely -- and add descriptions
of links to articles for the items that are included.
Twitter's list of trending topics has come under scrutiny for
promoting content at times stemming from misinformation campaigns
intended to make certain ideas appear more popular than they really
are.
Twitter also said the company plans to label any tweets that
falsely claim a win for any candidate and remove tweets that
encourage violence or call for people to interfere with polling
places or election results. To determine the results of an election
in the U.S., the company said it will require either an
announcement from state election officials or a public projection
from at least two authoritative, national news outlets that make
independent election calls.
Write to Georgia Wells at Georgia.Wells@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 09, 2020 15:19 ET (19:19 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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