Photo: Chriss Keane/Reuters. Twitter Spittle: me
Twitter knows the U.S. presidential election is going to be rough. Extremely rough. While attempting to undermine elections is already against Twitter’s rules, they’re expanding it to include misinformation about elections and their results. They’ll also delete some posts, rather than just mark them with a label. The new rules will prevent people from tweeting false information about elections, faked or premature election results, or encouraging fraud.
For example, telling people to vote twice would be against these new rules. It was also against the law when Donald Trump did it, but unlike Republicans, Twitter actually cares about the rules, and will do something when someone breaks them.
The new guidelines will kick off next week in an effort to enable, as Twitter calls it, “a peaceful transfer of power or orderly succession.”
Twitters New Rules
Twitter’s updated policies are “to further protect the civic conversation.” They seem targeted towards ensuring our election doesn’t fall apart thanks to Twitter. After all, the 2016 election fell apart largely due to misinformation that spread on Facebook and Twitter.
Unfortunately, Twitter’s still focused on “providing context, not fact-checking.” However, they could still directly link to fact checking sites and discussions to provide factual context. The three new guidelines come down to these (directly from Twitter’s blog post):
- False or misleading information that causes confusion about the laws and regulations of a civic process, or officials and institutions executing those civic processes.
- Disputed claims that could undermine faith in the process itself, e.g. unverified information about election rigging, ballot tampering, vote tallying, or certification of election results.
- Misleading claims about the results or outcome of a civic process which calls for or could lead to interference with the implementation of the results of the process, e.g. claiming victory before election results have been certified, inciting unlawful conduct to prevent a peaceful transfer of power or orderly succession.
Basically put, lying about the election, attempting to undermine the election, and lying about the results will break Twitter’s rules. Twitter will label all tweets and remove some. Tweets that loosely fall under these guidelines will also have limited visibility. This is Twitter’s way of limiting the spread of rule bending tweets, which may do harm, but don’t explicitly break rules. It’s a compromise.
Anyone in Mind?
It’s been theorized that Trump would claim victory on election night and try to invalidate the counting of mail-in ballots. Because he made a political issue of COVID-19, his supporters are less likely to believe the science and more likely to risk their lives and the lives of people around them by voting in person on election day. That could artificially inflate his vote count on election night. Trump would then likely try to claim victory, despite the fact that the votes won’t be tallied yet. Twitter won’t allow that.
Let’s be honest, in a healthy democracy, this wouldn’t be necessary. We don’t have a healthy democracy. We have a president who breaks federal law, is still in violation of the emoluments clause of the constitution, and has been impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors (while many others were ignored). By telling people to vote twice, he broke the law, and his own party is allowing it. Twitter made this rule because Republicans, and especially Trump, aren’t playing by the rules that govern this country. But they’ll have to play by Twitter’s rules, because Twitter respects itself far more than our politicians respect this country.
Sources:
- Karissa Bell, Engadget
- Taylor Hatmaker, Techcrunch
- Makena Kelly, The Verge