Twitter said on Thursday it applied contextual labels to approximately 300,000 tweets for content that was disputed or potentially misleading during a two-week period covering the US presidential election, CNN reported.
In addition to the labeling, Twitter said more than 450 of all the labeled tweets were also covered up by a warning message and were subject to sharing restrictions that limited how they could be retweeted.
Roughly three out of four people who viewed those tweets did so after the labeling was applied, Twitter said in a blog post. The analysis focused on tweets about the US election from October 27 to November 11.
Many of those tweets which have been labelled for misinformation were sent by President Donald Trump who continues to insist there was voter fraud in the election.
As of the morning of November 7, 16 out of 43 of Trump's post-election tweets had been labeled.
The social media site had already raised the ire of Trump before the election after it hid or attached warnings to some of his tweets.
Twitter recently hid a tweet from Trump in which he threatened to use "serious force" against protesters in the US capital, saying it broke rules over abusive content.
Previously, it attached a warning to some of Trump’s tweets, prompting readers to fact-check the president’s claims.
"We also want to be very clear that we do not see our job as done — our work here continues and our teams are learning and improving how we address these challenges," wrote Vijaya Gadde and Kayvon Beykpour, who respectively lead Twitter's legal and product teams. "We'll be sharing a comprehensive report on the election early next year."
Thursday’s disclosure comes as Twitter rolls back certain preemptive policies that it put in place ahead of Election Day. Twitter said it found that removing recommendations to users for who they ought to follow had little meaningful impact on misinformation during the election, and the company will undo that change on Thursday.
The company said it will also relax some of the restrictions surrounding what trending topics users may see under a curated tab on its website labeled "For You." During the election, Twitter said only topics that provided additional in-line context were permitted in that section of the site. That change is also being reversed.
One election-related change that Twitter will keep is an extra screen prompting users to quote tweet content instead of retweeting it. Twitter said its data showed that the limitation reduced sharing via quote tweets and retweets by 20%, and that it "slowed the spread of misleading information by virtue of an overall reduction in the amount of sharing on the service."
The company said it will continue to study the impact of the change and may revisit it in the future.