Twitter has a plan to combat US midterm election misinformation

Twitter on Thursday August 11, 2022, revealed a plan to combat the spread of misinformation in the upcoming November 8 US midterm elections. 

The microblogging site is reintroducing the Civic Integrity Policy that it first rolled out in 2018. The policy relies on identifying misleading content and labelling or removing it. It focuses on stopping misleading information that might: stop or dissuade people from voting, undermine public confidence in the election, show incorrect information about the outcome of the election.

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While doing so, the company will link “credible information or helpful context” to such tweets as well as not recommend tweets flagged by twitter or amplify such content. Additionally, when people attempt to like a flagged tweet, the social media platform will inform them that there is a likelihood that it may not be share as it contains misinformation.

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In an effort to become a reliable source of information during the midterm elections, Twitter is bringing back ‘prebunks’ which are an attempt to “address topics that may be subject to misinformation.” The company says that it will place these prompts in people’s timelines in the US as well as in the Search bar for when people look up related hashtags, phrases and terms. 

In addition, a new Explore Tab will be made available to US users. It will showcase localised news sources by state, national news in both English and Spanish from “reputed news outlets” and will show voter education information gathered through voting advocacy organisations.

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Twitter will also change up its UI by showing all “critical candidate information” on the profile of people running for the Senate, House of Representatives, or the Governor’s office. 

Finally, the social media platform is going to make it harder to hack into any government official, election candidate and journalist’s account. The company say it will do so by “increasing login defenses to prevent malicious account takeover attempts”, expedited account recovery, and finally,  more resources directed towards helping account holders respond to suspicious activity.