Twitter added Labels with additional context for around 300,000 tweets With potentially misleading or controversial content over two weeks spanning the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. Additionally, Twitter said that more than 450 of the flagged tweets were obscured by an alert, with limited retweeted and overall engagement. The analysis looked at tweets about the elections between October 27 and November 11.
The social media company, along with others Technology giants like Facebook and Googleworked on it Misinformation about fight elections. Meanwhile, some social media users, including President Donald Trump, have been questioning the election results since calling for Democrat Joe Biden, who won the referendum by about 5 million more votes in the US than his rival. Trump has used social media to falsely claim, without evidence, that the 2020 election was "stolen" from him. Twitter has added warning labels to several of Trump's tweets, including one falsely claiming he won the election.
For more of that
Subscribe to the CNET Now newsletter to receive the most important stories of the day from our editors.
Twitter also looked at what and what didn't help contain misinformation. The removal of user recommendations to be followed, for example, did not significantly affect the misinformation in elections. Twitter will roll back this change on Thursday. It also undoes a pre-election change where only topics with additional inline context were displayed on the For You tab with trending topics.
One feature that apparently worked well at slowing down the spread of misleading information was one that prompted users to tweet quotes rather than just retweet. Well when people hit the retweet button You will be shown the quote tweet composer and are encouraged to add their own comment. The total number of retweets and quote tweets combined has fallen by 20% since then, says Twitter.
"This change created friction and gave people an extra moment to ponder why and what they were adding to the conversation," Twitter said in the blog post. "This change slowed the spread of misleading information by reducing the number of shares for the service as a whole."
Twitter said it needs more time to research the impact of this change and is leaving it in place for now.
See also: President Trump's Legacy: A Social Media Addiction Though He Scolded It
