Twitter intervened roughly 300,000 times in recent weeks to flag posts made on its platform containing potentially misleading information about the U.S. election, the company announced Thursday.
Warning labels were placed on around 300,000 election-related posts made by Twitter users between Oct. 27 and Nov. 11, the company said in a blog post. Election Day took place last Tuesday, Nov. 3.
The labels, placed by Twitter, were applied to posts found to contain “disputed and potentially misleading” claims about the election, wrote Twitter leads Vijaya Gadde and Kayvon Beykpour.
Of those, 456 posts, or tweets, were also hidden by Twitter behind warnings and were blocked from being shared, or retweeted, by other users unless being quoted, they wrote in the blog post.
In all, the roughly 300,000 tweets flagged by Twitter account for approximately 0.2% of all U.S. election-related posts made on its platform during the two weeks, they said.
The warnings are slated to remain “part of our continued strategy to add context and limit the spread of misleading information about election processes around the world on Twitter,” they added.
President Trump, a prolific Twitter user, had at least 40 his tweets flagged or hidden behind warning labels in the seven days since voting ended.
“Twitter is out of control,” he tweeted last week.
Fifteen of Mr. Trump’s recent election-related tweets were placed by Twitter behind warnings, accounting for around 3% of all election-related posts censored that way.
Republicans aren’t the only Twitter users finding their posts flagged.
Former presidential hopeful Andrew Yang is among several prominent Democrats who prematurely tweeted about Joseph R. Biden being elected the next president and had their posts labeled accordingly.
Multiple news outlets have since projected Mr. Biden won the White House race, although Mr. Trump has not conceded and is challenging some states in court.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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