Twitter’s new rules to combat misinformation prior to US election

By Rahul Vaimal, Associate Editor
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On Thursday, Twitter said in a blog post that it would label or remove posts aiming to spread misinformation to diminish faith in the US election.

Twitter has updated its rules and regulations to identify the changes in how people will vote in the November 3rd election and try to safeguard against voter suppression and misleading content in the platform.

Any posts which promote false victory claims, unlawful election practices to hinder the peaceful transfer of power, unverified information on vote tallying or ballot tampering would be removed from next week onwards.

Due to the pandemic’s spread, mail ballots will be used widely in the US election and it would create a significant delay in tallying votes, experts fear that this delay would allow fostering misinformation.

US President Donald Trump himself without any proof has asserted that mail ballots are susceptible to involve large-scale vote tampering.

Twitter announced this policy will take effect globally on September 17 and are applied equally and judicially on everyone.

Social media companies were under great pressure to fight misinformation spreading after the US intelligence agencies determined that Russia used social media platforms to intervene in the 2016 presidential election.

Last day Google stated that it will remove those programs that try to predict and complete the search terms when users look for updates on voting location, voting requirements or voting methods.

It will also remove those auto predictions in search about the ethics of the election, and claims for or against the candidates.

Google cleared that misinformation regarding the election results or false claims on victory will be removed from the search predictions and it would implement its ad policy against false claims that intend to reduce the faith in the election. 

Facebook had also declared last week that it will create labels for posts that make false victory claims and it would stop accepting new political ads a week before Election day.

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