Yahoo Finance Twitter will add warning labels to tweets with premature election results
The company will label official campaign and candidate accounts — including the president's.
A day before election day, Twitter is providing more detail on how it will address tweets — including Donald Trump’s — that declare victory or otherwise share results that are not yet finalized. Twitter previewed a series of labels it will add to tweets “to provide context when results have not been officially called,” and explained which organizations it considers “official” sources of election results.
The company had previously shared that it would label tweets that could be misleading about election results, but we now know exactly how Twitter plans to deploy them. Under its rules, the company says it may label any official campaign or candidate account, as well as tweets from accounts with more than 100,000 followers or viral tweets with “significant engagement.”
Twitter previewed two different versions of the label, one that says “official sources have called this differently,” and another that reads “official sources may not have called this race when this was tweeted.” The label will appear underneath the tweets in users' timelines, and as warning before they are able to be retweeted. (As with previous updates, the app is pushing users to Quote Tweet instead of Retweet.) The company says it will apply the labels “beginning on election night through the inauguration” and “will be prioritizing the presidential election and other highly contested races.”
In terms of how Twitter will determine when election results are “official,” the company says it will rely on state election officials and national news outlets that have “dedicated, independent election decision desks,” including: ABC News, Associated Press, CBS News, CNN, Decision Desk HQ, Fox News and NBC News.
The update comes as Twitter has taken a number of steps to prepare for an uncertain election in which official results could be significantly delayed compared with previous years. The company has also taken steps to prepare for tweets that try to incite violence or interfere with the transfer of power after the election.
