Twitter is taking on its No. 1 agitator in the name of protecting electoral democracy by combating both domestic and foreign disinformation.
But the changes announced Friday will also contain the sort of robust and rapid-fire political discourse at the heart of Twitter's identity, not only by politicians but by millions of everyday users.
New warnings will be attached to the lies of candidates, at least through Election Day. The site will reject any posts calling for voter intimidation or violence connected to the presidential or congressional elections. And no one will be permitted to declare victory before races have been called by major news organizations — a mirror of what Facebook announced a day earlier.
The curbs suggest both companies are working to assure they get back on the right side of social media history, four years after they were a significant if secondary part of the Russian campaign to meddle in the election. Misinformation and false reports spread virtually unchecked across the major platforms. Now that those disinformation efforts have supplanted hacking as the foreign interference method of choice, U.S national security agencies say, the companies are making unprecedented moves to limit their roles as unwitting or passive accomplices.
A consequence of joining Facebook, however, is that Twitter has now taken on its most prominent and also most powerful influencer.
President Trump has long made tweets his principal form of communicating with the world, from unveiling fundamental federal policy shifts to working out personal grudges. And this year Twitter had been his main venue for an unprecedented assault by a sitting president on the bedrock institution of democracy: unspooling dozens of baseless claims about fraud and mail-in voting, designed to sow doubt about the integrity of an election he might lose.
"Twitter has a critical role to play in protecting the integrity of the election conversation," company officials said in a blog post published at noon. "We encourage candidates, campaigns, news outlets and voters to use Twitter respectfully and to recognize our collective responsibility to the electorate to guarantee a safe, fair and legitimate democratic process this November,"
Until the election and any subsequent disputes are over, the company said, all of its millions of users will be slowed down before hitting the retweet button: They will need to take an extra step, designed to make people pause, of at least considering whether to provide comment above the tweet they're about to share.
Recommendations and trends will get new curbs intended to prevent abuse.
Twitter's announcement puts additional curbs on candidates with more than 100,000 followers, which covers not only Trump (with 87 million) and former Vice President Joe Biden (11 million) but virtually every candidate in a competitive Senate race and plenty of House candidates, too.
Their premature claims of victory, made before officials or credible news sources have called the election, will get called out with a warning label and users will be directed to Twitter's election page.
And they will be subject to "additional warnings and restrictions" if they spread falsehoods. This expands on the Twitter policy imposed in May that has resulted in more than a dozen Trump tweets, mainly jeremiads against voting by mail, being veiled with a warning screen and subject to retweet curbs.
Trump and many fellow Republicans maintain Twitter is out to squelch political speech and ideas only on the right. Democrats and good-government groups generally endorse more social media regulation as a way to block patently wrong propaganda and maybe even improve the tenor of civic discourse.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.