Twitter has updated the labels for US Presidential election-related misinformation to show Joe Biden is the president-elect. It has also updated labels on US President Donald Trump’s tweets to reflect the same. Before this, Twitter labelled the claims of election fraud as “disputed”.
The updated Twitter label says, “Election officials have certified Joe Biden as the winner of the U.S. Presidential election.” The label link takes you to a Twitter election page which features news from multiple media outlets.
The Verge points out that Facebook’s labels on the same tweets from Donald Trump look different than Twitter’s. “Election officials follow strict rules and have found no evidence of widespread fraud,” reads Facebook labels in a stark contrast to Twitter that has declared Joe Biden as the president-elect.
Twitter’s misinformation label had become a topic of discussion when the company began adding them to Trump’s tweets and in some cases even hiding tweets.
Interestingly, Twitter last week said it had “inadvertently” limited engagements for a brief period on Trump’s tweets with “disputed” labels.
“We inadvertently took action to limit engagements on the labelled Tweet you referenced. This action has been reversed”, a Twitter spokesman told Reuters.
According to a separate Bloomberg report, Twitter and Facebook are going to reverse changes to their content policies that were implemented to curb the spread of misinformation on their platforms during the election. For instance, Twitter will restore one-click retweets after registering a 20% decline in sharing after the change. Facebook had changed its algorithm to push more news from sources it considered authentic.
