SAN FRANCISCO, November 13, (THEWILL) – Social media giant, Twitter said it labelled approximately 300,000 tweets for disputed and “potentially misleading” contents about the U.S. elections over the last two weeks.
Twitter’s Head of Legal, Policy and Trust, Vijaya Gadde, and its Head of Product, Kayvon Beykpour disclosed this in a statement on Thursday evening.
According to Gadde and Beykpour, the affected tweets represent 0.2% of no fewer than 150 million U.S. election-related messages sent on the platform during the two-week period.
“More than a year ago, the public told us they wanted Twitter to offer context on misleading information.
“This is the exact approach we’ve implemented on Tweets about COVID-19, synthetic and manipulated media, and the 2020 U.S. election that could contribute to offline harm.
“We continue to apply labels to add context and limit the risk of harmful election misinformation spreading without important context”, they said.
The officials said 456 of the affected tweets received warning messages and had their engagement features limited during the period between Oct. 27 and Nov. 11.
They said the enforcement actions were part of ongoing efforts to limit the spread of misleading information about election processes around the world on Twitter.
“We remain vigilant and will continue working to protect the integrity of the election conversation on Twitter.
“As we’ve done for many elections around the world, we will produce a longer-form retrospective of all of our work around the 2020 U.S. Election in early 2021.
“We will continue to research, question, and change features that may encourage behaviours on Twitter that negatively affect the health of the public conversation”, Gadde and Beykpour added.
Meanwhile, China on Friday congratulated US President-elect, Joe Biden.
“We respect the choice of the American people. We express our congratulations to Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris”, said foreign ministry spokesman, Wang Wenbin.
Wang said China understands “the result of the US election will be determined in accordance with US laws and procedures”.
China was previously among a handful of major countries including Russia and Mexico that had not congratulated the Joe Biden.
US-China ties have grown increasingly strained in recent years under the administration of incumbent Donald Trump.
Trump’s four years in the White House have been marked by trade war between the two powers, with Beijing and Washington also sparring over blame for the Covid-19 pandemic.
Under his “America First” banner, Trump has portrayed China as the greatest threat to the United States and global democracy
