Social-Media
Facebook, Twitter is taking action to limit the President's misleading election statements
After a night in which President Donald Trump wrongly declared dominance in the presidential race, Facebook added a message to the top of Facebook and Instagram feeds that there was — as yet — no winner.
Earlier in the night, both Twitter and Facebook decided to mark a post — the same on both platforms — from Trump's reading, We're up high, but they're trying to Win the election. We're never going to let them do that. Votes can not be cast until the vote is finished! Twitter has imposed limits on the posting of tweets.
Early results were positive for the president, but a number of crucial states are still counting ballots, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan , and Wisconsin. This job does not include new votes being cast, but also deals with an extraordinary surge of mail-in ballots that have been legally cast but have not yet been counted.
Once President Trump began making premature claims of victory, we started running notifications on Facebook and Instagram that votes are still being counted and a winner is not projected. We're also automatically applying labels to both candidates’ posts with this information. pic.twitter.com/tuGGLJkwcy
— Facebook Newsroom (@fbnewsroom) November 4, 2020
Reached for clarification, Twitter sent a tweet from the company's @safety account soon after the regulations had been enforced. We put a warning on the @realDonaldTrump Post for making a highly false point about the referendum, reads the tweet. This behavior is consistent with our Public Honesty Strategy.
Under Twitter constraints, users must click on a alert box to display a message when it appears on feeds and homepages and can not like or react to a post. Retweets are restricted to the "quote post" feature, where users can only send a message with their own comments.
President Trump sent the same letter on Facebook, where the site added a sticker to the post explaining that votes are already being counted and that people are being directed to the Facebook Electoral Information Centre. Facebook has not taken any steps to block the dissemination of the post within its network.
In a different post on both networks, Trump appeared to point to a potential announcement without going as far as an early confirmation of victory. I'm going to make a declaration tonight. Yeah, a major victory! The post is reading. Neither network has taken some action against this second post.
Both Twitter and Facebook introduced specific rules against early win announcements in September, and the policies seem to have been implemented as they were at the time. Since 17 September, Twitter's disinformation policy has shielded early declarations of victory, rendering them liable to be deleted by moderators. Facebook's solution is more limited: it said that it will mark election-related posts and guide users to authoritative details. Facebook has imposed limits on paid promotion of election-related content, meaning that politicians could not use the company's advertisement network to raise claims.
Earlier that day, Twitter imposed similar constraints on Trump's campaign team. Mike Roman, the campaign 's director of election day operations, released tweets claiming systematic voting irregularities in Philadelphia, along with a video that was later considered deceptive by the city's district attorney.
Misinformation spread online has lead to more calls to the Election Task Force hotline than real polling places, the district attorney's office told reporters.
