Twitter Is Bringing Back Election Verification Labels For 2020 Candidates

Twitter said on Thursday that it will start verifying the accounts of all candidates running in 2020 congressional and gubernatorial party primaries.

The new verification — which will add what Twitter calls “U.S. Election Labels” — will add the standard blue checkmark next to the individual’s name for all verified accounts. In addition, it will place a governmental icon below the candidate’s name, along with what office they are running for, their state and district number.

A version of the feature was launched during the 2018 midterm elections. During that time, Twitter says the labels were seen 100 million times each day leading up to the election. In that experiment, verification only went into effect during the general election.

However, this time around, Twitter is expanding to include the primaries — a move the company says is meant to not privilege certain candidates.

“A significant factor in expanding verification to these races was to ensure a level playing field,” Twitter spokesperson Nick Pacilio said in an email, Politico reported.

Questions over fairness have arisen after Twitter announced in October that it would ban all campaign and issue ads on its platform. That decision came about as Facebook has been embroiled in controversy due to its refusal to properly monitor and remove misleading and false political advertising on its site.

Twitter says it hopes that verified and properly identified candidates will receive extra credibility and visibility on its platform. In part, that’s because Twitter’s algorithm prioritizes verified accounts, which will make them appear at the top of some search results and at the top of a long list of replies to an original tweet.

Twitter noted that 13 percent of U.S. election-related conversations on the platform included a tweet with an Election Label.

Twitter has partnered with Ballotpedia — a civic nonprofit that publishes non-partisan information about federal, state and local politics — for the new endeavor. The organization will help Twitter identify candidates so their accounts can be properly labeled.

“Election Labels provide information about political candidates, like the office they are running for, their state and district number, and contain a small ballot box icon,” Twitter wrote in a blog post. “The Label will appear on the profile page of a candidate’s Twitter account and on every Tweet sent and Retweeted by the candidate’s account.”

Twitter paused its general verification program in 2017 over concerns that it lacked fairness or rationality. The program is reportedly being “revamped,” but the company still verifies accounts when it deems the conditions appropriate.

The social media giant has been forced to rethink its role in politics since the election of President Donald Trump who tends to favor Twitter as his means of communication with the public. As The Inquisitr reported on Thursday, Trump shot out more than 80 tweets just a few hours as the House Judiciary Committee held marathon hearings on impeachment.