Twitter India to prevent prohibited political advertising for assembly polls

Microblogging platform Twitter India has said that it is taking proactive measures to prevent prohibited political advertising during the upcoming assembly polls. The measures include identifying and blocking ads from referenced candidates, parties, and other election-related content.

 Five states - Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal - are going to polls between 27th March and 29th April. Assam and West Bengal have multi-phase polls while Kerala, Puducherry, and Tamil Nadu have single-phase polls.

"Twitter banned political ads in 2019, we believe that political message reach should be earned, not bought, bringing ads from political candidates and political parties to an end. We are taking proactive measures to prevent prohibited political advertising through comprehensive and nuanced enforcement mechanisms. These include identifying and blocking ads from referenced candidates, parties, and other election-related content," Twitter said in a blog post.

Twitter also said it is committed to empowering democratic conversations, facilitating meaningful political debate, and driving civic participation during elections. "With the #AssemblyElections2021 in Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, and Puducherry a few days away, we are implementing significant product, policy, and enforcement updates that have been drawn based on learning from previous elections, both globally and in India."

The platform has a global cross-functional team with local, cultural, and language expertise to run the election integrity work. Their role is to keep the service safe from attempts to manipulate the platform and content that can incite violence, abuse, and threats and trigger the risk of offline harm.

It is also investing in technological solutions and has deployed tools backed by technology to detect and surface abusive content more efficiently. "This way, the content that's most likely to cause harm is prioritised for review by our team of specialists to determine whether the content violates the Twitter Rules."

Twitter averred that its approach to tackling misinformation is multi-layered and prioritised based on the highest potential for harm at a policy, enforcement, and product level. "Our goal is to make it easy to find credible information on Twitter while limiting the spread of potentially harmful and misleading content. In the context of these elections, we are focussed on Civic integrity and Synthetic and manipulated media."

The platform will enforce civic integrity policy by removing content that manipulates or interferes with elections and is false or contains misleading information about (1) procedures to participate in the election process (2) false information intended to intimidate or dissuade people from participating in the elections and voting, such as misleading claims that polling places are closed; that polling has ended, or other misleading information relating to votes not being counted, and, (3) accounts that misrepresent their affiliation with a political candidate or party.

It will also label Synthetic and manipulated media and link it to a Twitter Moment to give people additional context and surface-related conversations so they can make more informed decisions on the content they want to engage with or amplify.

Twitter will also act against attempted manipulation, including malicious automated accounts and spam, as well as other activities that violate its Terms of Service. "Inauthentic engagement, which includes things like selling/purchasing Tweet or account metric inflation (like Retweets, Likes, mentions, Twitter Poll votes), is a violation and we will take action on accounts that engage in this behavior, which may include permanent suspension. We haven’t observed any significant manipulation or interference and will continue to conduct proactive enforcement sweeps to detect instances of inauthentic and networked activity that may be associated with the elections."

The blog post also highlighted that when people attempt to Retweet Tweets with a synthetic and manipulated media label, they will see a prompt pointing them to credible information. These Tweets won’t be algorithmically recommended by Twitter, which further reduces the visibility of misleading information, it added.

Twitter will launch an events page dedicated to the Assembly elections on voting days and for the election results day. "The page will include a timeline of Tweets from credible accounts to provide the latest information on the days of voting and election results. These will be visible to account holders in India in the Explore Tab, and will provide continuous updates and context throughout the election period with multiple language videos from a variety of news partners in the carousel."