Last Updated on September 10, 2020
Today Twitter revealed in its new policy update that it intends to provide additional context to any candidate who declares victory before the new election system, being modified daily to cope with the fallout from COVID-19, has fully tabulated absentee votes, mail in votes, and in person votes to declare a winner beyond reasonable doubt.
Starting on September 17, Twitter will “label or remove false or misleading information intended to undermine public confidence in an election or other civic process.” The website then lists several examples of “false or misleading information” that it may remove:
- False or misleading information that causes confusion about the laws and regulations of a civic process, or officials and institutions executing those civic processes.
- Disputed claims that could undermine faith in the process itself, e.g. unverified information about election rigging, ballot tampering, vote tallying, or certification of election results.
- Misleading claims about the results or outcome of a civic process which calls for or could lead to interference with the implementation of the results of the process, e.g. claiming victory before election results have been certified, inciting unlawful conduct to prevent a peaceful transfer of power or orderly succession.
In other words, if citizen journalists attempt to blow the whistle on potential fraud happening in their local polling places, they may see their post given a “label” or “removed” from Twitter.
Additionally, if President Donald Trump were to declare victory on November 3, citing an overwhelming response at the polls, Twitter may “label or remove” this declaration, and instead claim that the president must wait for the election results to be “certified.”
This new decision by Twitter closely mirrors a decision by Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg made public over the weekend. Zuckerberg intends to censor or remove posts from candidates who declare victory before Facebook and “other media” come to a “consensus” about the winner.
“One of the things that I think we and other media need to start doing is preparing the American people,” said Zuckerberg, is “That there’s nothing illegitimate about this election taking additional days or even weeks to make sure that all the votes are counted, in fact, that may be important to be sure that this is a legitimate and fair election.”
Zuckerberg explained that Facebook will use “a bunch of of different messaging around that, just so people know that that’s normal.”
Then, Zuckerberg explained that “If one of the candidates, in any of the races, claims victory before there’s a consensus result, then we’re going to add some informational context to that post directly, saying that there’s no consensus result yet.”
Big tech’s sudden interest in the election comes after top Democrats and establishment Republicans engaged in a war game that saw former Hillary Clinton acolyte John Podesta role play Joe Biden. Podesta, role playing Biden, refused to concede the election, going as far as planning a second inauguration in California, before the game was stopped because it became apparent the American people would look toward the military to determine the next president.
The United States’ top general recently published a letter to members of Congress explicitly stating that the military will not become involved in the election in what represented a blow to the Podesta/Biden war game strategy.
