A little over a week before the US elections, Twitter has offered a breakdown of some of his efforts to label misleading tweets. The site claims that from October 27 to November 11 it tagged around 300,000 tweets as part of its civic integrity policy. This equates to roughly 0.2% of the total number of election-related tweets sent during that two-week period.
Of course, not all Twitter alerts are created equal. Only 456 of these included a warning that covered text and limited user engagement, disabling retweets, replies, and likes. That specific warning led to limited engagement, with about three-quarters of those who encountered the tweets seeing the blacked-out texts (by clicking on the warning). According to data from Twitter, the tweets of citations for those who are so tagged fell by about 29%.
The US president has received a disproportionate number of those labels, as the New York Times notes that just over a third of Trump's tweets between November 3 and 6 were hit by such a warning. The end of the election (to the extent that the election actually ended, I suppose) seems to have slowed down the site's response times a bit, though Trump continues to be reported, as he continues to devote most of his feed to contestation. election results confirmed by almost all major media outlets.
His latest tweet at the time of writing was tagged as disputed, but not hidden, as Trump repeats the claims against voting machine maker Dominion. "We also want to be very clear that our work is not done," wrote Vijaya Gadde, Head of Legal, Policy and Trust and Safety, and Kayvon Beykpour, Product Manager. "Our work here continues and our teams are learning and improving the way we face these challenges."
Twitter and other social media sites have come under close scrutiny after the 2016 election for the role that platforms play in spreading disinformation. Twitter has tried to address this by editing recommendations and retweets, as well as individually tagging tweets that violate its policies.
Before today, YouTube defended his decision to maintain controversial election-related videos, noting, "Like other companies, we are allowing these videos because the discussion of election results and the vote-counting process is allowed on YT. These videos are not shown or recommended in a way evident. "