Twitter reinforces policies to fight misleading information ahead of May 2022 polls

Social media platform Twitter on Thursday has announced its plan to reinforce policies in the campaign against the spread of misleading information days ahead of the national and local elections in May 2022.

The announcement was made at the Legal Network for Truthful Elections (LENTE)'s launch of its first Twitter space conversations by Twitter Philippines Public Policy and Partnerships Lead Sei Salvador.

“We are reinforcing our policies against manipulating or interfering in elections this includes labeling, misleading tweets to provide additional context and also to help reduce the visibility of misleading information,” she said.

“For example, we may remove or label tweets that contain false or misleading information on, let's say in participation in elections and the voting process. We may also remove accounts or content that falsely misrepresent affiliation to a certain candidate, elected official, political party, even the electoral authority or a government entity,” she added.

Salvador said Twitter has also partnered with a wide range of organizations to educate voters to facilitate “healthy discussions on election specific issues.”

“This general elections we’ll see a diverse voter base this includes over four million new voters belonging to 18 to 21 age group. Here at twitter we partner with the wide range of organizations to educate voters on the election process to fight against misinformation and also to foster healthy discussions around elections specific issues,” Salvador said.

“All of these initiatives are simply driven by our commitment to facilitate meaningful, political debate and also driving civic participation and protecting the integrity of election conversation from interference and manipulation,” she added.

In 2019, Twitter suspended all political advertising globally on its platform in response to growing criticism over misinformation from politicians on social media.

Twitter's Southeast Asia Head of Public Policy and Philanthropy Lynn Ampolpittayanant said the decision was made through their beliefs that “political message reach should be earned and not bought.”

“We acknowledged that internet advertising is incredible, powerful, and very effective for commercial advertisers that brings significant risk to the politics and it is indebted in our mission to serve the public conversation that is why at Twitter we made the decision and it has been over two years, that we did that globally and also including in the Philippines and let’s go back to the part that we have the responsibility to protect the integrity of the elections from interference and manipulation,” she added.

Chief executive Jack Dorsey earlier said in a tweet that the company took the action to head off potential problems from "machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes."

The move comes with Facebook under pressure to apply fact-checking to politicians running ads with debunked claims. -- BAP, GMA News