Twitter has reportedly removed an option to report election misinformation.
The Australian branch of Reset.Tech, an Internet digital policy activist group, wrote to Twitter this week "to report our urgent concerns about the ability for users to report electoral misinformation on your platform." An option to alert Twitter about misleading tweets appears to have disappeared "in the last week or two," Reset.Tech Australia wrote to Angus Keene, Managing Director of Twitter Australia-New Zealand.
The option to report a tweet as misleading in 2021. (Credit: Twitter)In 2021, Twitter started testing letting users in the US, South Korea, and Australia directly report a misleading tweet to the platform’s content moderators. It let you report a tweet as "misleading," and then drill down to say it was related to politics. If you clicked politics, the company would inquire if the alleged misinformation was tied to an election.
The option expanded to Brazil, Spain, and the Philippines in 2022. Twitter's Help Center still has a section about the test. And as Reset.Tech notes, the company's Civic integrity policy says "you may not advance verifiably false or misleading information about how to participate in an election or other civic process."
An August 2023 update to that policy says the company, now known as X, "will apply labels to violative posts informing users that the content is misleading." Prohibited content includes tweets "that may suppress participation, mislead people about when, where, or how to participate in a civic process, or lead to offline violence during an election."
It does not, however, say how to report an election-related post as misleading. Current reporting options include Hate, Abuse & Harassment, Violent Speech, Child Safety, Privacy, Spam, Suicide or self-harm, Sensitive or disturbing media, Deceptive identities, and Violent & hateful entities. No "misleading" option.
"A recent change to your reporting process appears to have left Australian users unable to report electoral misinformation," Reset.Tech notes. "This may leave violative content subject to an inappropriate review process and not labelled or removed in compliance with your policies."
The open letter acknowledges that the feature's disappearance may just "signal an end to the ‘test’ of allowing users to report electoral misinformation in Australia." But, the group argues, it comes "at a disastrous point in time for Australia’s electoral integrity," since the country is preparing to vote on the Australian Indigenous Voice referendun in October. It may also violate the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation, of which Twitter is a signatory.
The news is probably not too surprising for those who follow Twitter's owner, Elon Musk. He tweeted yesterday that the company had killed its election integrity team because it was "undermining election integrity," Musk tweeted.
Someone may want to tell Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino. During an appearance at the Code Conference later that day, she insisted "there is a robust and growing team at X that is wrapping their arms around election integrity."
Neither she nor Musk have directly addressed the Reset.Tech letter, which was sent shortly after a study conducted by the EU found Twitter to be the social network with the most disinformation.
