Politico | How Covid-19 pushed Twitter to fact-check Trump’s tweets
- The company is taking the lessons learned from countering tweets that could endanger people’s health and applying them to Trump’s Twitter feed
This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Nancy Scola on politico.com on May 27, 2020.
Twitter says the coronavirus outbreak prompted it to re-evaluate its approach to these grey-area tweets and treat some of them as potentially dangerous.
“Covid was a game changer,” said Twitter spokesperson Katie Rosborough.
“We now have the tools in place to label content that may contain misleading claims that could cause offline harm,” said Rosborough. Those tools include the warning labels attached to Trump’s tweets that link to a Twitter “Moment”, or collection of content, explaining objections to his post.
Twitter has not yet defined what generally counts as offline harm, but in the case of coronavirus-related content, it has identified tweets like those that advocate protecting yourself from the virus using methods public health authorities say are ineffective.
Now Twitter is applying a similar metric to non-coronavirus-related tweets by the president of the United States.
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On Tuesday, Twitter added warning labels to two Trump tweets claiming, without evidence, that mail-in ballots, like those being used in California amid the pandemic, are likely to be “substantially fraudulent”. The labels directed users to a link to “get the facts about mail-in ballots”.
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That said, Twitter has at least one reason to not be as shaken by such threats as bigger players in social might be. Unlike Facebook and Google, the company is too small to trigger the scrutiny of federal antitrust authorities who could be leaned on by an angry president.
Under the new approach, for example, Twitter added warning labels to tweets alleging that the novel coronavirus was spread not by human contact but the wireless technology 5G.
“Our research has shown people don’t want us to decide what’s true for them, but they want us to provide further context when possible,” Rosborough said.
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In the case of the Trump tweets on mail-in ballots, part of the harm calculation was their timing: Trump was calling mail-in ballots “fraudulent” right at the moment some US states are using them to administer elections amid the pandemic, the company said.
And the Trump warning labels have significantly ratcheted up tensions between Trump and Twitter.
On the left, many argue that Twitter is only taking the weakest possible action in response to rampant misinformation from the White House and ignoring many tweets that are just as egregious. The same day that Twitter decided Trump’s voting tweets went too far, it declined a request by the husband of a deceased Florida woman whom Trump had suggested with no evidence had been murdered by MSNBC host Joe Scarborough. The company said the decision to leave Trump’s Scarborough quotes alone was made quickly, as they were judged to not be in violation of any of Twitter’s existing policies.
But Twitter left a hint this week that it may continue to expand the categories of tweets it evaluates with this new approach to tweets like the one Trump levied at Scarborough.
In expressing sympathy to the widower, Twitter gave a bit of insight into its thinking in a line that looked at first like a throwaway: “We’ve been working to expand existing product features and policies so we can more effectively address things like this going forward, and we hope to have those changes in place shortly.”
It indicated that the company is preparing to get its hands dirty on more of Trump’s tweets – at least those, as with the Scarborough tweets, he makes seemingly wild claims with no evidence.
Sceptics will say that Twitter remains, as it has been throughout its 14-year existence, haphazard about how it creates, articulates and enforces its policies. And its new handling of misleading tweets isn’t likely to do much to quiet those concerns. For one thing, the policy isn’t articulated anywhere in the site’s stated rules.
Congressman Ro Khanna, a Democrat representing a considerable slice of Silicon Valley, gave voice to some of that argument in a tweet of his own Wednesday: “This disagreement is exactly why we need thoughtful policies to consistently limit misinformation, instead of ad hoc fact checks whenever the headlines push Twitter hard enough”.
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Twitter quickly tested out that new policy on at least one world leader: at the tail end of March it deleted coronavirus-related tweets from Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, judging them to be so harmful that they didn’t even merit protection under Twitter’s policy of placing a label on rule-breaking tweets by world leaders.
That post sets up three categories of tweets where it might step in: “misleading information”, “disputed claims” and “unverified claims”. The Trump tweets on mail-in ballots, the company said, were the first instance since the implementation of the new approach in which it became aware of a piece of misleading information posted by the president concerning enough to take on under the new framework.
