Twitter Uses Warning Labels to Guard Against Tweets Claiming Unofficial Election Results

By Yehudit Garmaise

     To prevent the spread of misinformation tomorrow as the country waits with bated breath for the results of the presidential election, Twitter has announced today that it will not allow just anyone to announce a winner.

  Fearing that political parties, organizations, or individuals will tweet misinformation about the election results before those results are “official,”  Twitter said today that it would only consider results as authentic, as those coming from state election officials and national news outlets, such as ABC, the Associated Press, CNN, and Fox News, which all have independent election decision desks.

   All other Twitter accounts that have more than 100,000 followers, Twitter said, will be tagged with warning labels that warn Twitter users that tweeted election results are not to be believed as valid.

  One reason that election results may be delayed is that many more voters are mailing in their ballots this year because of COVID-19. In addition, because most states accept ballots that are postmarked by tomorrow’s Election Day, the ballots that arrive after tomorrow also will have to be counted.

   While in 2016, the number of mail-in ballots was approximately 33 million, the circumstances of the COVID pandemic have caused experts to estimate that that number will be at least doubled by the end of tomorrow’s election.

   Twitter may be insisting on labeling potential premature claims to presidential victory because many feel its bias toward the Left was revealed a few weeks ago, when the social media giant locked, for two weeks, the account of the New York Post right after the paper published a story that revealed potentially corrupt activities of Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate.  

  On Oct. 14, when the Post tweeted the story about Hunter Biden, Twitter claimed that the stories violated the social-media company’s policies against posting material that contains personal information and is obtained via hacking.

   As the story broke, Twitter shut down the account of the Post and prevented users from retweeting the stories.

   Conservative Radio Host Ben Shapiro, who is the editor of The Daily Wire, however, pointed out that day that Twitter has allowed four years of false claims about the administration of President Donald Trump, but none of the tweeters responsible for those false claims have ever been shut down.