The Technology 202: Trump’s Twitter feed is covered in warning labels

The company labeled a tweet from Trump declaring victory in several states where results had not yet been finalized, as well as in Michigan, where news outlets had already projected a victory for Biden. The company also quickly slapped warning boxes over several of the president’s tweets making baseless claims of election fraud, as Trump’s campaign mounted a blitz of legal challenges over the election process. Twitter prevented retweets or likes of those tweets, warning they “might be misleading about the election.” 

Meanwhile many of the same claims also appeared on Facebook, which also applied labels at the bottom of the posts in most instances to provide greater context about the U.S. election process. However, Facebook didn’t prevent people from liking or sharing the posts, which meant they could still spread across its much larger service. 

Other prominent conservatives were spreading false claims of victory in battleground states or amplifying misleading photos and videos to cast doubt on the vote counting process. Experts observed a tightly knit network of prominent conservatives with large online followings repeatedly amplifying each other’s misleading posts.

Eric Trump also linked to a misleading video, which claimed a man burned 80 Trump ballots. Election officials in Virginia Beach, where the video appeared to be taken, released a statement that said they were not official ballots, they are sample ballots. Twitter suspended the account that initially shared the video. 

The company also took action against multiple tweets from Richard Grenell, the former acting director of the Office of National Intelligence. The company shielded his tweets baselessly asserting that Biden and the Democrats “threw ballots into mailboxes” without proper checks. It also shielded multiple tweets from James Woods, an actor and Trump supporter, that warned without evidence of the threat of mail-in “ballot harvesting.”  

“The fact that you have the same accounts violating the rules over and over again that don’t get punished is going to be something the platforms are going to have to address,”  Alex Stamos, the former chief security officer of Facebook and director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, told reporters last night. 

People will just keep crossing the line if they’re just slapped with a label because it can increase their following among conservatives, especially those who think the companies have gone too far in moderating political views, Stamos said. The behavior might not change unless people risk losing their accounts. 

It also remains unclear how effective the labeling is in limiting the false claims on the services because tools that tech companies provide researchers to track the spread of viral information, such as Facebook’s CrowdTangle, do not distinguish between labeled and unlabeled content, according to members of the Election Integrity Project, a coalition of research entities.  

Color of Change, a civil rights organization, launched a petition yesterday calling for Twitter to suspend Trump’s account so that he couldn’t tweet anymore. It’s sharing it with the hashtag #SuspendTrump. 

“Social media should not be a lever for Trump may deploy to make his allegations of election fraud credible,” the organizers wrote. “History has shown the missteps of social media in the past. Take action and let’s not repeat them in the future.”

Democratic lawmakers also called for similar action. From Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.): 

Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) warned the tweets from Trump and his allies showed Silicon Valley’s policies don’t go far enough. 

“With every policy the platforms belatedly announce, we’ve continued to see Trump and his allies flout and circumvent them,” he said in a statement. “The consequences here are dire: As the President and his campaign grow more desperate, they are willing to spread even more inflammatory and dangerous falsehoods, with the very real possibility of prompting violence.”

As of last night, disinformation researchers said calls to violence on major social platforms had largely been nonspecific and aspirational. However, the researchers did not necessarily have access to some of the more private channels where people communicate, such as Facebook groups and encrypted messaging. 

There are signs Facebook groups are being used to mobilize pro-Trump protesters. Groups that organized to protest coronavirus lockdowns are being leveraged to protest the election. Just before pro-Trump protestors banged on windows outside of Detroit’s TCF Center yesterday to protest the continued counting of votes, a Facebook group previously devoted to protesting coronavirus restrictions urged members to “be a presence” at the voting facility, according to NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins. It’s unclear if the messages drove people to the convention center. 

Videos using the hashtags #fraudonlywaybidenwins and #riggedelection circulated on the platform Wednesday. Many of the posts under the hashtags parroted unverified claims by President Trump that Biden’s lead in some swing states was the result of fraud.

The influx of election fraud related content shows how claims are moving from Facebook and Twitter to smaller platforms, researchers at the Stanford Election Integrity Partnership say. For instance, prominent content in the search for #riggedelection consisted of viral tweets screenshotted from Twitter.

Republican influencers were also pushing out allegations of voter fraud, the New York Times’s Taylor Lorenz reported,

TikTok redirected the hashtag #fraudonlywaybidenwins to its community guidelines after The Post flagged the search. But #riggedelection was still searchable as of Wednesday night and had over 1 million views. 

Because many election hashtags also include parodies and debunks, TikTok largely focuses on identifying and removing videos that do, said spokeswoman Jamie Favazza. In some cases where disinformation is implied in a hashtag, like in the case of the Biden hashtag, the site will redirect search results or make the content ineligible for recommendation.

The approach has resulted in mixed success, researchers say.

“TikTok is kind of a tale of two platforms because they have a team that is very reactive to reports they get but they are having a problem being proactive,” said Stanford’s Alex Stamos. Adding to that complication is the site’s video-based content, which is harder to police than text he says.

He suggested the platform should be monitoring hashtags surfacing disinformation on other platforms more aggressively.

Bangor is one of more than half a dozen cities that have banned facial recognition in some form. Advocates and researchers have shown that the technology is less accurate when used on nonwhite faces, and they’ve warned it could lead to discrimination in policing. San Francisco, Oakland, Calif., Boston and Sommerville, Mass., have also banned government use of the technology. 

The agency had been investigating reports that Sprint had claimed monthly subsides from a program for low-income consumers for nearly 900,000 subscribers who were not using the service. The fraud represented nearly a third of Sprint’s customers for Lifeline, David Shepardson at Reuters reports.

The settlement is the largest-fixed amount the agency has ever negotiated to resolve an investigation. 

The alleged fraud took place before Sprint merged with T-Mobile. As a part of the agreement, Sprint will also adhere to a compliance plan from the agency.

The fact that the election hasn’t been called didn’t stop Gap from chiming in…and quickly getting dragged. The New York Times Sapna Maheshwari explains:

But deleting the tweet didn’t stop users from dragging it. 

Here’s another viral moment they could have capitalized on:

Here’s the video Ryan is referencing:

Maybe it ended up uniting the Internet after all!

• Uber will release earnings today.

Only on my third pot today so far: