As Americans have anxiously anticipated updates from battleground states painstakingly counting ballots, Twitter has been busy removing knockoff news accounts and labeling tweets that peddle inaccurate information.
Twitter’s moderation of content has included deleting fake Associated Press Twitter accounts and labeling some tweets as “misleading.”
“Heads up, there are some fake AP Twitter accounts floating around. The place to follow our race calls is at @AP_Politics,” wrote AP Washington Bureau Chief Julie Pace the day after the election.
Many news outlets rely on the AP for election updates, and multiple faux AP accounts have popped up and posted declarations that either President Donald Trump or Democratic candidate Joe Biden had won contested states likes Georgia and Michigan.
The Wall Street Journal reported that most accounts mimicking the AP, and at least one false CNN account, had called states prematurely for Biden. One of the knockoff accounts identified had incorrectly declared that Trump was reelected.
On Thursday, AP’s official Twitter account posted a reminder to Twitter users that it “continues to count votes in the presidential election and has not declared a winner.”
“When AP does declare a winner, it will be tweeted from @AP and @AP_Politics,” the wire service added.
Twitter has been quick to identify and suspend the mock accounts, The Wall Street Journal reported, but that has not stopped Twitter users from sharing the misinformation beforehand.
To tell the difference between actual and fake news accounts, the verified Associated Press account has more than 14 million followers and the the verified AP Politics account has more than a half-million followers. New mock accounts will be unverified — will not have Twitter’s blue check label — and will have very few followers.
Twitter is also labeling tweets that spread misinformation about the election with a warning that “some or all of the content” in a tweet “is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.”
That warning can be seen on some of President Trump’s tweets.
The text of the labeled tweets are not visible on a user’s Twitter page unless the specific tweet is clicked on individually. Once clicking on the tweet, the text is available for Twitter users to see and the cautionary label remains.
Several tweets from Donald Trump Jr., the president oldest son, have also been labeled as misleading by Twitter.
The Trumps and Republican politicians complain that social media companies like Twitter and Facebook have an anti-conservative bias and have “censored” their posts, while Democrats and liberals have accused Facebook of being too accommodating to conservatives, the Deseret News has reported.
The tech companies point out that the disputed content violates their terms of service and are labeled accordingly.
At a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing last week, GOP senators — including Utah’s Mike Lee — grilled chief executives of Twitter, Facebook and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) on the tech company’s “censoring” of conservative content on their platforms.
Each of the executives testified that they receive complaints of bias from both conservatives and liberals, but there is not an intentional partisan moderation of content on their platforms.
“We will continue to work and push back on any manipulation of the platform,” Twitter’s Jack Dorsey said during the hearing about the company’s plan to combat election interference.