Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Twitter joins new push to curb election chaos online, by Trump and regular folk

Donald Trump on Twitter

Twitter is taking further steps to stop the spread of disinformation, taking on its most powerful user.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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.

Read More

When Good Intentions Kill Cures: A Warning on AI Regulation

Kevin Frazier warns that one-size-fits-all AI laws risk stifling innovation. Learn the 7 “sins” policymakers must avoid to protect progress.

Getty Images, Aitor Diago

When Good Intentions Kill Cures: A Warning on AI Regulation

Imagine it is 2028. A start-up in St. Louis trains an AI model that can spot pancreatic cancer six months earlier than the best radiologists, buying patients precious time that medicine has never been able to give them. But the model never leaves the lab. Why? Because a well-intentioned, technology-neutral state statute drafted in 2025 forces every “automated decision system” to undergo a one-size-fits-all bias audit, to be repeated annually, and to be performed only by outside experts who—three years in—still do not exist in sufficient numbers. While regulators scramble, the company’s venture funding dries up, the founders decamp to Singapore, and thousands of Americans are deprived of an innovation that would have saved their lives.

That grim vignette is fictional—so far. But it is the predictable destination of the seven “deadly sins” that already haunt our AI policy debates. Reactive politicians are at risk of passing laws that fly in the face of what qualifies as good policy for emerging technologies.

Keep ReadingShow less
President Donald Trump standing next to a chart in the Oval Office.

U.S. President Donald Trump discusses economic data with Stephen Moore (L), Senior Visiting Fellow in Economics at The Heritage Foundation, in the Oval Office on August 07, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Getty Images, Win McNamee

Investor-in-Chief: Trump’s Business Deals, Loyalty Scorecards, and the Rise of Neo-Socialist Capitalism

For over 100 years, the Republican Party has stood for free-market capitalism and keeping the government’s heavy hand out of the economy. Government intervention in the economy, well, that’s what leaders did in the Soviet Union and communist China, not in the land of Uncle Sam.

And then Donald Trump seized the reins of the Republican Party. Trump has dispensed with numerous federal customs and rules, so it’s not too surprising that he is now turning his administration into the most business-interventionist government ever in American history. Contrary to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” in the economy, suddenly, the signs of the White House’s “visible hand” are everywhere.

Keep ReadingShow less
Cuando El Idioma Se Convierte En Blanco, La Democracia Pierde Su Voz

Hands holding bars over "Se Habla Español" sign

AI generated

Cuando El Idioma Se Convierte En Blanco, La Democracia Pierde Su Voz

On Monday, the Supreme Court issued a 6–3 decision from its “shadow docket” that reversed a lower-court injunction and gave federal immigration agents in Los Angeles the green light to resume stops based on four deeply troubling criteria:

  • Apparent race or ethnicity
  • Speaking Spanish or accented English
  • Presence in a particular location
  • Type of work

The case, Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, is still working its way through the courts. But the message from this emergency ruling is unmistakable: the constitutional protections that once shielded immigrant communities from racial profiling are now conditional—and increasingly fragile.

Keep ReadingShow less