Twitter says it tagged 300,000 tweets around the election

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Twitter has witnessed a wave of disinformation as users including President Donald Trump – who has nearly 89 million followers – and his allies spread false and misleading statements about the election and its outcome. As of the morning of November 7, 16 of Trump’s 43 post-election tweets had been tagged.

In addition to labeling, Twitter (TWTR) said over 450 of all tagged tweets were also covered by a warning message and were subject to sharing restrictions that limited how they could be retweeted. About three in four people who viewed these tweets did so after the tagging was applied, Twitter said in a blog post. The analysis focused on tweets about the U.S. election from October 27 to November 11.

“We also want to be very clear that we do not consider our work to be done – our work here continues and our teams are learning and improving the way we meet these challenges,” wrote Vijaya Gadde and Kayvon Beykpour, who lead Twitter’s Legal Department and Product, respectively. teams. “We will be sharing a full report on the elections early next year.”

The disclosure comes as Twitter rolls back some preventative policies it put in place before election day. Twitter said it found that removing user recommendations about who to follow had little significant impact on disinformation during the election, and the company will reverse the change on Thursday.

The company said it would also ease some of the restrictions on trending topics that users can see under an organized tab on its website titled “For You.” During the election, Twitter said that only topics that provide additional online context are allowed in this section of the site. This change is also reversed.

One election-related change that Twitter will keep is an additional screen prompting users to quote the content of the tweet instead of retweeting it. Twitter said its data showed that the limitation reduced sharing via tweets and retweets of quotes by 20%, and that it “slows the spread of misleading information due to an overall reduction in the amount of sharing on the service”. The company said it will continue to study the impact of the change and may revisit it in the future.

Twitter did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for data on how long it typically took Twitter to label disinformation, or which accounts were primarily responsible for posting the tweets that were ultimately reported. .

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