Twitter To Roll Out New Standards

Twitter announced on Thursday that it will expand its policy on election-related misinformation and establish new rules that may force the platform to more actively conduct fact-checks on President Donald Trump in the final months of the 2020 campaign.

The social media giant introduced a new policy in a blog post that stated that Twitter (TWTR) will add or hide all tweets on the fact-checking label, which contain “false or misleading information about election rules, leading to “Confusion” carries “unverified information about election manipulation.”

Twitter’s permeable and subjective policies have enabled Trump to continuously spread misinformation about the election to millions of Americans. The company spearheaded the development of big technology companies when it reprimanded Trump for a misleading tweet in May, but this watershed moment looked more like an outlier. Twitter rarely uses fact-checking tags on Trump’s tweets, which contain false information about votes. It is not clear how many tags can be achieved.

The new rules include policies aimed at reducing potential post-election chaos, which is the main concern this year, due to Trump’s remarks and the influx of mailed votes, which will slow down the counting of votes. Twitter will now ban “misleading claims about the outcome”, premature victory claims or “incitement to illegal behavior” to prevent a peaceful transition of power.

Facebook and Twitter marked Trump’s post as a two-time vote, but never said it was illegal to do so.The company says it will “label or remove” posts that break the rules, but didn’t spell out what process will be used to determine what is egregious enough to get removed instead of labeled.