Twitter will designate the official campaign accounts of candidates running for office in the 2018 midterm elections with a special label, the social media platform announced Wednesday.
Starting May 30, Twitter said it will let candidates vying for state governor or for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives earmark their campaign accounts with “election labels” — a small icon of a government building accompanied by information about the office each candidate is seeking, like the state or district they’d represent if elected.
“Twitter has become the first place voters go to seek accurate information, resources, and breaking news from journalists, political candidates, and elected officials,” said Twitter senior public policy manager Bridget Coyne. “We understand the significance of this responsibility and our teams are building new ways for people who use Twitter to identify original sources and authentic information.”
“Providing the public with authentic, trustworthy information is crucial to the democratic process, and we are committed to furthering that goal through the tools we continue to build,” Ms. Coyne wrote in a blog post.
The election labels will appear on the main profile page of candidates and alongside each of their tweets and retweets, including tweeted embedded on sites hosted off of Twitter, the blog post said.
The project is being undertaken with Ballotpedia, a nonprofit civic organization that publishes election data, and labels will be applied to consenting Twitter accounts on a rolling basis through the 2018 election season, according to the blog post.
“Our team is excited to have the opportunity to help Twitter users accurately identify the candidates in their upcoming elections,” said Geoff Pallay, Ballotpedia’s editor-in-chief. “We believe high-quality data and information is essential to a thriving and healthy political process. To feel confident, readers need to trust the content they consume.”
Indeed, U.S. intelligence officials assessed that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 White House race in part by using professional internet trolls to spread disinformation on platforms including Twitter in the months preceding President Trump’s election.
Twitter, for its part, said roughly 1.4 million users based in the U.S. engaged in one form or another during the 2016 race with content created by accounts operated the Internet Research Agency, a Russian firm that hired the state-sponsored internet trolls responsible for the alleged election meddling.
“The Russians utilize this tool because it’s relatively cheap, it’s low risk, it offers what they perceive as plausible deniability and it’s proven to be effective at sowing division,” Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this year. “We expect Russia to continue using propaganda, social media, false flag personas, sympathetic spokesmen, and other means of influence to try to build on its wide range of operations and exacerbate social and political fissures in the United States.”
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