Platform will ‘down rank’ political candidates tweets if they ‘violate’ rules
Source: Steve Watson
Twitter has declared that it will limit the reach of President Trump’s tweets ahead of the 2020 election as campaigning amps up.
The social media platform, which has come under fire recently for silencing prominent conservative voices online, notes that it will begin using algorithms to “down-rank” tweets by politicians which ‘violate’ their rules.
The Washington Post reported that such tweets by all verified political candidates and government officials with over 100,000 followers will be tagged with a label:
“Before users can view the language in newly flagged tweets, they will need to click on a screen that says, “The Twitter Rules about abusive behavior apply to this Tweet. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain available.
The company also said it will set up a special team tasked with enforcing the policy, and the notification label would appear only on rare occasions.”
The report explains that Twitter will deprioritize the labeled tweets so that they would be seen by fewer people.
“In the past, we’ve allowed certain Tweets that violated our rules to remain on Twitter because they were in the public’s interest, but it wasn’t clear when and how we made those determinations,” the company said in a statement Thursday.
“To fix that, we’re introducing a new notice that will provide additional clarity in these situations, and sharing more on when and why we’ll use it.” the statement added.
The new policy means that tweets such as the ones below from Trump today criticizing Democrats and touting his own achievements would likely be flagged and down ranked.
There can be no doubt now that Big Tech is determined not to let history repeat and is engaged in a vociferous attempt to sabotage Trump’s campaign for reelection.
