Twitter labeled 300,000 tweets related to the US presidential election ‘potentially misleading’ in the week before and after Election Day, the company has announced.
That represented 0.2 percent of all US election-related tweets during the two-week period between October 27 and November 11 – and some of those flagged were posted or retweet by President Donald Trump.
A separate report found nearly half of Trump’s tweets had been flagged by between November 3 and November 5, The Independent reports.
On election day, one-sixth of his 55 tweets were deemed to contain ‘misinformation’ and seven out of 18 have since been labeled.
In all, 456 tweets were obscured by a warning message and were not able to be liked, retweeted or replied to, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal, policy and trust and safety, said in a blog post.
Three-quarters of users who saw those tweets did so after they had been labeled, Gadde added.
She also indicated messages from Twitter that election results were likely to be delayed, and that voting by mail is safe and legitimate, were seen 389 million times.
Scroll down for video
Between October 27 and November 11, Twitter flagged 300,000 election-related tweets and ‘potentially misleading,’ representing under one percent of all election-themed posts on the platform.
‘These enforcement actions remain part of our continued strategy to add context and limit the spread of misleading information about election processes around the world on Twitter,’ Gadde wrote.
Twitter says it will continue to closely monitor election-related tweets into the new year.
‘We remain vigilant and will continue working to protect the integrity of the election conversation on Twitter. As we’ve done for many elections around the world, we will produce a longer-form retrospective of all of our work around the 2020 US Election in early 2021,’ Gadde wrote.
The company will continue to investigate and change features that encourage behaviors ‘that negatively affect the health of the public conversation,’ she added.
Just 456 tweets were obscured by a warning message and were not able to be liked, retweeted or replied to, Twitter said. Three-quarters of users who saw those tweets did so after they had been labeled. Twitter flagged 50 tweets posted or retweeted by President Donald Trump
Twitter began ramping up content moderation policies in the months and weeks leading up to the election.
It banned all political ads, added ‘Election’ Labels to candidates’ accounts, and labeled doctored photos and videos ‘manipulated media.’
It also added labels and warnings to potentially harmful misleading information about mail-in voting.
Labels, warnings and prompts were added to tweets that falsely or prematurely claimed a candidate had won their race, and tweets that incited violence or interference with election results.
The company disabled ‘likes’ and retweeting on candidate’s posts if they had a misinformation or violation label attached.
Some of these steps were in response to President Trump, who has repeatedly used the platform to share unsubstantiated claims about mail-in voting, voter fraud, and even the outcome of the election.
Many of President Trump’s election-related tweets have been flagged as disputed or misleading by Twitter
In October, for example, Trump tweeted: ‘THE MEDIA IS CORRUPT, JUST LIKE OUR DEMOCRAT RUN BALLOT SYSTEM IS CORRUPT! Look at what’s happening with Fake, Missing and Fraudulent Ballots all over the Country??? VOTE.’
That tweet was accompanied by a label that read: ‘Learn how voting by mail is safe and secure.’
Trump repeatedly alleged, without proof, that he won the election and that the voting process had been corrupted by massive fraud.
Since then, tweets from the president claiming that Pennsylvania voters were being sent blank ballots were also flagged, as were his claims he had received ’73 million legal votes.’
