The Silicon Valley Thought Police are hot on the trail of political thoughtcrime ahead of this year’s midterm elections in the United States.
On Thursday, the San Francisco-based microblogging service Twitter announced that it was dusting off its Civic Integrity Policy, which the tech giant claims is meant to prohibit “manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes.”
“Today, we’re announcing steps we’re taking ahead of the US midterms to protect civic conversation on Twitter,” the company announced.
The company has had a version of the policy since 2018 and has touted its use in the Philippines, Kenya, Australia, Brazil, and India this year.
“Today, as we do ahead of other global elections, we’re activating enforcement of our Civic Integrity Policy for the 2022 US midterms.”
For instance, if you harbor any thought about the 2020 presidential election in the United States being anything less than a completely honest event in which perennial political afterthought Joe Biden secured 81 million votes, it’s probably best to stay off of the left-leaning platform.
Twitter explained:
The Civic Integrity Policy covers the most common types of harmful misleading information about elections and civic events, such as: claims about how to participate in a civic process like how to vote, misleading content intended to intimidate or dissuade people from participating in the election, and misleading claims intended to undermine public confidence in an election — including false information about the outcome of the election.
Among the tools Twitter will be using to combat what it terms “misleading information” will be to add links to questionable stories which they claim will add “credible information” or “helpful context.”
Twitter will also be using what it calls “prebunks” to address topics that the company believes are ripe for “misleading narratives.”
“We’re also bringing back prebunks — in English, Spanish, and all other languages supported on Twitter — to get ahead of misleading narratives on Twitter, and to proactively address topics that may be the subject of misinformation,” Twitter announced. “Over the coming months, we’ll place prompts directly on people’s timelines in the US and in Search when people type related terms, phrases, or hashtags.”
The company also plans to push news outlets that they consider “credible.”
A special “Explore” tag will provide links to sources for “National news in both English and Spanish by reputable news outlets, curated by Twitter’s Curation team.”
Twitter also plans to throttle what it calls “misleading” tweets by limiting users’ ability to like or share such information.
“Earlier this year, in the US and Brazil, we tested ways to prevent misleading Tweets from being recommended through notifications. Early results show that impressions on misleading information dropped by 1.6 million per month, as a direct result of the experiment,” the company stated.
Twitter was widely condemned in 2020 for throttling the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the lead-up to the election. The company suspended the Post’s account for several days, indicating that the veracity of the Hunter Biden story was in question.
The laptop story was later confirmed as accurate even by left-wing news sources such as The New York Times and The Washington Post in April of this year. A Newsbusters poll showed that up to 17 percent of Biden voters would not have voted for him had they known the full facts behind stories that the mainstream media and Big Tech — including Twitter — downplayed during the election season.
“One of every six Biden voters we surveyed (17%) said they would have abandoned the Democratic candidate had they known the facts about one or more of these news stories,” a Newsbusters special report revealed.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who was planning to purchase Twitter prior to pulling out of the deal in July, slammed the company for throttling the laptop story: “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate,” Musk tweeted.
Musk and the company are currently engaged in a legal battle over the billionaire’s decision to nix the deal because the entrepreneur claimed that Twitter failed to provide accurate information regarding fake or spam accounts on the platform.
Of course, it’s not surprising that Twitter has again chosen to take sides in yet another election. It’s disappointing, sure, but hardly surprising.
