WASHINGTON – Twitter has labelled 300,000 posts related to the US presidential election as “potentially misleading” in the two weeks surrounding the vote, making up 0.2% of polls-related tweets, said the company yesterday.
The social network said the labels were issued between October 27 and November 11, one week before and after the November 3 election that Democrat Joe Biden won over incumbent Donald Trump.
Of the 300,000 flagged tweets, 456 were covered over by a warning message and had engagement features limited – users could not like, retweet or reply to the posts, said Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal, policy, and trust and safety, in a blog post.
She estimated that 74% of people who saw the problematic tweets did so after they were labelled as misleading or flagged with a warning message, and sharing of the posts, as a result, declined by about 29%.
During the election period, Twitter posted messages on US users’ pages that were seen 389 million times, that “reminded people that election results were likely to be delayed, and that voting by mail is safe and legitimate”, she said.
Nearly half of Trump’s tweets were flagged by the platform in the days following the vote as the president claimed, without evidence, that he won and that the process was tainted by massive fraud. – AFP, November 13, 2020
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