Twitter Slows Down Retweets Ahead of U.S. Election--2nd Update

By Georgia Wells

Twitter Inc. will make it harder for posts to go viral ahead of the U.S. election, including by putting limits on how users can retweet.

The moves unveiled Friday, which also include pointing users viewing certain tweets to credible content, are among the boldest yet for the social-media platform and are designed to slow the spread of misinformation.

Where users previously hit a button to reshare, or "retweet," items, they will now be directed to a screen that will encourage adding commentary before resharing posts. If users don't write anything, their post will still appear as a traditional retweet -- but the change "adds some extra friction" in the process, according to a company blog post.

Twitter will start experimenting with this change for some users later on Friday and will roll it out to all users Oct. 20. The change will last at least through the end of the week of the U.S. election.

"We hope 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," Twitter's legal, policy, trust and safety head Vijaya Gadde and product lead Kayvon Beykpour wrote in a blog post Friday.

Social-media companies have been scrambling to clamp down on potential confusion and ways their platforms can be abused to undermine the integrity of the political process in the U.S.

Facebook Inc. has said it would suspend all political advertising after the polls close Nov. 3, something that other platforms including Twitter and TikTok have already implemented, and many platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, have taken steps to ban QAnon, the fast-growing conspiracy movement.

Twitter has conducted prior experiments to encourage users to read articles before sharing them on the site.

Additionally, Twitter plans to display a new prompt that provides credible information when users attempt to retweet a post that Twitter has identified as containing misleading information. This change starts next week.

Twitter currently labels tweets that contain misleading information about Covid-19 and U.S. elections, among other items. Tweets that receive these labels are de-amplified in Twitter's algorithm, and the company, in some cases, will remove these tweets.

Twitter said Friday a subset of the tweets that receive misinformation labels will be made harder for users to share and feature a suggestion that users add their own context before reposting them. These new warnings will apply to tweets that are labeled as containing misinformation and posted by users who have outsized influence on the platform, such as U.S. political figures and U.S.-based users with more than 100,000 followers.

In a bid to slow the spread of tweets, the company is tweaking its algorithm to stop tweets from appearing in feeds simply based on the amount of likes they receive. Currently, the tweets that users see are arranged via an algorithm that includes content from accounts they follow as well as tweets that other users like.

Other changes are designed to add more context rather than slow the spread of content. Twitter said it will only surface topics in its personalized trending topics tab for users in the U.S. if they include an explanation. This change will require Twitter's curators to review the trending topics more closely -- and add descriptions of links to articles for the items that are included.

Twitter's list of trending topics has come under scrutiny for promoting content at times stemming from misinformation campaigns intended to make certain ideas appear more popular than they really are.

Twitter also said the company plans to label any tweets that falsely claim a win for any candidate and remove tweets that encourage violence or call for people to interfere with polling places or election results. To determine the results of an election in the U.S., the company said it will require either an announcement from state election officials or a public projection from at least two authoritative, national news outlets that make independent election calls.

Write to Georgia Wells at Georgia.Wells@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 09, 2020 15:19 ET (19:19 GMT)

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