Twitter’s emphasis on up-to-the-second posts has made the site a must-visit destination for people to find the latest in news and current events. It has also made Twitter a vessel for the spread of false information.
To stem that tide, Twitter on Monday announced a new effort to preemptively debunk, or “prebunk” in Twitter parlance, some of the most commonly circulated false and misleading information about the election.
The company will, for the first time, pin information to the top of users’ timelines about how to vote, as well as a notice that voting results may not come immediately on Election Day — two common topics for misinformation across social media.
“We believe it’s critical that we make it easy for people to find that information,” said Nick Pacilio, a Twitter spokesman. “These prompts will alert people that they may encounter misinformation, and provide them with credible, factual information on the subject.”
The move is the latest in a series of actions taken by Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to place safeguards on their networks in the days leading up to Election Day. Lawmakers and the public harshly criticized the companies for allowing misinformation to spread ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Facebook, which at three billion users is much larger than Twitter, has announced several changes in the past few months to stem misinformation about the election. It has started to pin facts about voting to the top of users’ timelines, added labels to posts that spread false voting information, placed a ban on new political advertising in the seven days before Election Day, and removed paid political ads entirely after the polls close.
Twitter has taken several steps, too. Last week, the company turned off some of the features that help tweets go viral faster. That includes adding an extra step to retweeting posts, and prompting users to avoid retweeting a post with a link to a news article if they had not already read the attached article.
The new pinned information will appear in the home timeline of every person with a Twitter account located within the United States, and will be available in 42 languages, beginning Monday.
The prompts will also appear in Twitter’s search bar when people search for related terms or hashtags. Each pinned alert will also link out to a collection of credible information on the subject — be it information on how to vote, or election returns — curated within a Twitter “moment” compiled from election experts, journalists and other authoritative sources of information.