Social networking platform, Twitter has taken a bold step towards fighting misinformation and fake news as it recently took action against the U.S. President Donald Trump, by fact-checking all his tweets.
Being its first time ever, Twitter responded by prompting most of its users to check for facts in tweets sent by Donald Trump, warning that his claims about mail-in bailouts were false and had been debunked by fact-checkers.
The new regulations and policies by Twitter have been something the company has been working on and implementing across its platform for a while now, and are seen as a new step forward by the social network service to help put a stop to misleading fake news and information.
After several years of complaints against the platforms failure to control and regulate fake accounts, misinformation, and abuse, Twitter has taken a stance and it all begins with Trump’s recent misleading tweets about mail-in bailouts.
This could become a problem for Donald Trump, who sees the social network as his main platform of choice when it comes to delivering unfiltered versions of his thoughts.
Donald Trump wasn’t happy with Twitter and lashed back at the social network
Trump’s response to Twitter’s new policies wasn’t shocking at all, as most people are by now used to his ways of speech. He accused the social network of interfering with free speech and U.S. 2020 presidential elections in a tweet that read: “Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!.”
Trump has over 80 million followers on Twitter, and according to his recent tweets, he claimed that the mail-in ballots would be “substantially fraudulent” and would result in a “rigged election.” He also singled out the governor of California over the issue, although the state is not the only one to use mail-in ballots.
Hours later, Twitter posted a blue exclamation mark alert underneath those tweets, prompting readers to “get the facts about mail-in ballots” and directing them to a page with information aggregated by Twitter staffers about the claims.
The policy will play a vital role in fighting back misinformation on the platform, and could also reduce on the level of abuse users go through while using it, which has been a serious issue in the past years. However, Trump instead made the same statements on Facebook which got a lot of shares and feedback.
Facebook, however, didn’t take any action against the post yet it has strict policies that don’t allow content that misrepresents methods of voting or voter registration. According to a statement by Facebook, “We believe that people should be able to have a robust debate about the electoral process, which is why we have crafted our policies to focus on misrepresentations that would interfere with the vote,” a Facebook spokesman told Reuters.
Twitter said the application of a fact-checking label to the president’s tweets was an extension of its new “misleading information” policy, introduced earlier this month to combat misinformation about the coronavirus.
Source: Gadgets Now
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