Twitter to limit retweets of politicians' misinformation

To think before you hit "retweet." What a strange notion.

The U.S. presidential election is fast approaching, and politicians around the country are getting ready to spew a bevy of bullshit on their favorite social media platforms. Twitter hopes you'll at least think for a moment before helping to spread those lies.

In a lengthy blog post, the San Francisco-based company laid out its plan to — if everything works out as intended — limit the spread of misinformation ahead of the election. Starting Oct. 20, and running "through at least the end of Election week," tweets from U.S. political figures will be kept on a shorter lease.

Specifically, ifTwitter identifies a tweet from a U.S. political figure as violating its "policies against misleading information about civic integrity, COVID-19, and synthetic and manipulated media" (and that's a big if), and ifit then decides to slap a label on said tweet, people's ability to interact with that tweet will be limited — and come with a friendly nudge.

You won't be able to reply to the tweet, like it, or straight retweet it. You will, however, still be able to quote tweet it — i.e., retweet it with a comment. And here comes the new nudge: Starting next week, if users attempt to retweet a tweet with one of the labels, "they will see a prompt pointing them to credible information about the topic before they are able to amplify it."

Lindsay McCallum, who works on the Twitter communications team, put it succinctly: "Think before you (re)tweet[.]"

Tweet may have been deleted

Importantly, these restrictions apply to more than just the accounts of U.S. politicians. They also cover campaign accounts, U.S.-based accounts with over 100,000 followers, and accounts "that obtain significant engagement."

Of course, we all know who these rules are really directed at.

Tweet may have been deleted

In addition to the above changes, Twitter is deemphasizing the plain-old retweet. Going forward, when you hit the "retweet" button, you will be automatically brought to the "quote tweet" field.

"Though this adds some extra friction for those who simply want to Retweet, 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, reactions and perspectives to the conversation," notes the blog post. "If people don’t add anything on the Quote Tweet composer, it will still appear as a Retweet."

Twitter began rolling out this specific change, for an unspecified number of people, today, but it will eventually apply to everyone.

Other election-related updates include ceasing to fill your timeline with "'liked by' and 'followed by' recommendations from people you don’t follow" (you can also set your timeline to chronological, by the way), and, like Facebook before it, labeling tweets that prematurely declare an election victory.

SEE ALSO: Trump falsely claims there's 'a cure' for COVID-19 in Facebook, Twitter posts

Taken together, these changes make clear that Twitter expects the closing days of the election — and the week that follow — to be a hot mess online. Maybe, just maybe, this effort will make things a tad less sloppy.

UPDATE: Oct. 10, 2020, 9:05 a.m. PDT: This post has been updated to emphasize that some of Twitter's announced changes (i.e. defaulting to the quote retweet field) apply to all users, and to add that attempting to retweet a labeled tweet will result in users being shown a "prompt" toward "credible information."

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