Civic integrity

We're working to prepare for elections, elevate credible information, and help keep you safe on Twitter

Hand casting a ballot - voting imagery

The mission of our civic integrity work is to protect the conversation on Twitter during elections or other civic processes.

We do this actively by helping elevate credible information, promoting safety, collaborating with partners, and providing transparency along the way.

 

Prepare for elections

Our civic integrity team evaluates the risks posed to global elections by looking at internal and external data, reviewing external assessments, and speaking to subject matter experts. Using external data and internal country-based metrics, we assess the potential for online or offline harm — in line with the Twitter Rules, threats to human safety and security, the potential for false or misleading information about civic processes, and human rights concerns.

These inputs inform how we support elections, or other civic events, which may include a combination of the actions outlined below.

 

Elevate credible information

Our goal is to foster free expression globally and ensure that conversations are based on reliable information and healthy discourse.

Civic integrity policy

Our civic integrity policy aims to prevent the use of Twitter to share or spread false or misleading information about a civic process (e.g., elections or census) that may disrupt or undermine public confidence in that process.

This policy is enforced when the risk for manipulation or interference is highest — generally a few months before and a couple of weeks after election day, depending on local and external factors. This policy is an additional, temporary protection on top of all the Twitter Rules, which are enforced year-round.

Moments

Election Moments help people discover credible information about civic events, including the latest news, information about how to participate, and more from official sources. Election Moments can also serve as debunks, which help elevate information from subject matter experts on prevalent misleading and false information. Moments can be found in the Explore tab and on relevant search pages and Trends.

Voter information and pre-bunk prompts

We create in-product prompts to help people understand how to participate in a civic process. We also proactively share prompts with credible context related to potential misinformation people might encounter online. These prompts may appear in your Home timeline, at the top of relevant search results, or in other places.

Candidate labels

We may add candidate labels to help you identify official political candidate accounts.

Trends monitoring and contextualization

We proactively review Trends and may add context by adding a title, description, a representative Tweet, or linking a Moment to help people understand why something is trending. If a Trend contains misleading information or violates other rules, it may be removed.

Article prompts

We may prompt people when they attempt to Retweet a news article they haven’t opened to encourage informed sharing.

Political advertising

We don’t allow ads of any type by candidates, political parties, or elected or appointed government officials. We began globally prohibiting the promotion of political content in 2019 based on our belief that political messaging reach should be earned, not bought.

 

Promote safety

We’re always looking for ways to strengthen Twitter against attempted manipulation, malicious automated accounts, and spam, as well as other activities that violate Twitter Rules.

Enhanced account security

We proactively help protect and secure accounts of government officials, candidates for office, journalists, and other people on Twitter whose accounts may be particularly vulnerable during certain civic processes. For supported civic events, accounts will be reminded to use a strong password, strongly encouraged to enable two-factor authentication, and check the third-party apps they’ve connected to their accounts. We will also enable password reset protection for accounts by default to help prevent unauthorized password changes.

Local enforcement guidance

We research and update our enforcement guidance to ensure our policies are implemented with local context and understanding, to help keep individuals that are particularly vulnerable during civic events safe.

Platform manipulation and spam monitoring

We investigate and remove accounts, hashtags, Retweets, spam, and fake engagement that seeks to manipulate the public conversation.

 

Provide transparency

We aim to be open and transparent about the steps we take and actively incorporate your feedback into our practices.

Transparency around elections

In line with our strong values of transparency, we are launching the Twitter Moderation Research Consortium (TMRC). Through the consortium, Twitter will share large-scale datasets concerning platform moderation issues with a global group of public interest researchers from academia, civil society, NGOs, and journalism studying platform governance issues.

 

Collaborate with partners

Elections and civic engagement partnerships are critical for tracking and promoting democratic conversation and engagement through Twitter.

Trusted information

We look to trusted regional experts who can provide the most up-to-date, relevant, and credible information. It’s important for us to curate and elevate these voices so you can get accurate information when you come to Twitter.

We work alongside political parties, researchers, experts, and election commissions and regulators around the world. We also stay in touch with national parties and state and local election officials to be sure they know how to report suspicious activity, abuse, and rule violations to us. Key election stakeholders also have channels to directly escalate any issues or concerns to us.

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