Twitter Imposes Tough New Restrictions Ahead of US Election

By Mary Anne R. First Posted: Oct 10, 2020 12:55 AM EDT

Twitter is enforcing new rules that prohibit candidates from declaring early victory.

The social media giant has improved its policy against the spread of misinformation on its platform. It also enforced new rules against calling for political violence and spreading thoughtless commentary in the days ahead of U.S. election on Nov. 3.

Twitter will remove tweets that encourage violence or call for people to interfere with election results. Posts that falsely claim that a candidate has won will be ordered to direct users to the official U.S. election results page on Twitter.

Twitter also announced on Friday that it would also make it more difficult to retweet a post that it categorized with misleading information. That can be about COVID-19 and civic integrity, including manipulated graphics. Seeing credible information about the topic will let the users retweet the post.

The new rules will start next week. It aims to make people pause and think, which slows the retweets that are often become a problem on the social media platform.

Starting on Oct. 20, Twitter said it would encourage people to add their own comments on retweets.

By doing this, it "will encourage everyone to not only consider why they are amplifying a Tweet, but also increase the likelihood that people add their own thoughts, reactions and perspectives to the conversation," according to a Twitter's blog post.

Guidelines On Politicians

Aside from the retweet feature changes, Twitter has also placed new limits on politicians with more than 100,000 followers.

That includes President Donald Trump, with 87 million followers, and Democrats' candidate, Joe Biden, with 10 million followers.

Facebook

Facebook earlier started similar new restrictions ahead of the U.S. election, which is less than a month away. Some states have already started early voting.

Facebook announced Thursday a restriction on political adds, which would be banned after the polls close on Nov. 3 to reduce public confusion on election outcomes.

Twitter, on the other hand, has not allowed any political advertisements. Disinformation on social media has gained increasing attention as a fundamental threat to the election process.

A Secure Election

U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other federal agencies said that they have confidence that the ballots are secure as it has ever been.

CISA's director, Chris Krebs said they have been working on it for three-and-a-half years.

CISA and involved agencies are keen to avoid what happened in 2016, when Russian military intelligence hacked the Illinois voter registration database.

Aside from the Illinois database, two Florida counties were also manipulated in the months leading up to the 2016 election.

Trump has said in public many times in public and social media that the 2020 election would somehow be "rigged."

Homeland Security Director Chad Wolf pictured a different scenario.

Wolf said they believe in preserving the integrity of the indispensable American tradition is significant in the administration's promise of putting America first.

He said that the men and women of CISA have traveled across the country, building relationships with state and local officials responsible to manage these critical systems.