Now that the election is over and Silicon Valley got the results they wanted, companies like Twitter and Facebook are pausing their efforts to quell conservative voices by reinstating certain retweet and algorithmic functions.
Beginning on Thursday, Twitter reinstated its immediate retweet operations, removing the cumbersome “quote tweet” feature that began plaguing users in October. Instead of requiring “commentary” to retweet something, Twitter once again allows users to quickly share content with one click of a button.
The adapted quote tweet function was part of Twitter’s campaign to “add context, encourage thoughtful consideration and reduce the potential for misleading information to spread on Twitter” before, during, and following the election.
In addition to reinstating fast retweets, Twitter also announced that it would be scaling back its context descriptions for trending topics on the “for you” page.
The threat of arbitrary fact-checking for trending phrases, names, or hashtags, however, still looms.
“Our goal is to help people see what’s happening while ensuring that potentially misleading trends are presented with context,” the company stated.
Our goal with prompting QTs (instead of Retweets) was to encourage more thoughtful amplification. We don’t believe that this happened, in practice. The use of Quote Tweets increased, but 45% of them included single-word affirmations and 70% had less than 25 characters. (2/4)
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) December 16, 2020
We’ll continue to focus on encouraging more thoughtful amplification. We believe this requires multiple solutions––some of which may be more effective than others. For example, we know that prompting you to read articles leads to more informed sharing. https://t.co/4NOK2cKBeF (4)
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) December 16, 2020
Facebook also confirmed that it will begin to withdraw its throttling of specific news outlets after the election, which limited the distribution of posts from certain pages and accounts under the guise of combating “false and misleading claims” about election results and fraud.
After successfully using a “secret internal ranking system” called news ecosystem quality scores (N.E.Q.) to determine which news stories the company would allow to circulate on the platform, Facebook directed digital traffic to corporate media news outlets such as CNN, NPR, and The New York Times while openly suppressing content from conservative sites.
Once again, the original change was first created to “help limit the spread of inaccurate claims about the election.”
Throughout the the election season, both Facebook and Twitter ran election interference that benefited the left, suppressing and removing the New York Post’s reporting about the Biden family’s corruption, censoring conservative voices and President Donald Trump, as well as enacting features and fact checks meant to curb the spread of what each big tech company arbitrarily declared was “misinformation” or “disinformation.”
