Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

Overall, the majority has been pro gay rights since around 2004. By 2017 it was 70% for, 24% against. Breaking down by party in 2017, Democrats were 83% for, Republicans 54% for.

Women 73% for, men 66% for. White 73%, Hispanic 70%, Black 63%.

81% postgrad, 77% college grad, 66% some college, 64% high school or less.

83% 18-29, 79% 30-49, 65% 50-64, 58% 65+. See [1].

When it comes to same sex marriage, by 2019 61% overall approved. That's been above 50% since 2013, and above the percentage opposed since 2011.

Republicans still aren't majority in favor, at 44%. Democrats are at 75%.

By religion, 79% of the unaffiliated are in favor, 66% of white mainline protestants, 61% of Catholics, 44% of Black protestants, and only 29% of white evangelical protestants.

66% of women, 57% of men. 62% of whites, 58% of Hispanics, and 51% of Blacks. 74% of Millennials, 58% Gen-X, 51% Boomers, and 45% of the Silent Generation. See [2].

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2017/10/05/5-homosexual...

[2] https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...

It's amusing that it took the election for them to finally admit this. I had thought much the same thing of Twitter's recommendations for a long time. People discussing divisive political issues shows up on my feed a lot, despite deliberate curation of who I follow, just because the people whose personal work I appreciate also happen to participate in political discussions in addition to posting their work, so the issues they "like" get posted on my feed. All of the posts they liked were from accounts I had no interest in following. Personally this change would cut down on the signal to noise ratio for me.

I am thinking they had to balance the improvement in their metrics for engagement they would gain by putting more novel out of network tweets in view, and the virtol and divisiveness the election-related media and misinformation propagating further would inevitably cause. Yes, there is not enough "sufficient, thoughtful consideration" put into the recommendations, but if they ultimately increase Twitter's user engagement and revenue then it takes a lot of effort to backtrack on them. It also makes me continue to believe that some kinds of information are detrimental in some ways, and Twitter is now controlling the flow of that information as to prevent public backlash or some other harm.

The challenge is combining the aforementioned technology into an accepted standard and intuitive user experience. The business model would be straightforward hosting. A major barrier is the lack of funding to get it off the ground.

Given how poorly the national news outlets performed on this the last presidential race, Twitter should really just limit this to state election official only.

In particular, I appreciate:

"10/2019 - Banned all political ads on Twitter, including ads from state-controlled media"

I hope Facebook employees are taking notes.

I'm also a huge fan of:

"...we will label Tweets that falsely claim a win for any candidate and will remove Tweets that encourage violence or call for people to interfere with election results or the smooth operation of polling places."

Does anyone know whether the next one is official US policy, or whether it's just Twitter's policy?

"To determine the results of an election in the US, we require either an announcement from state election officials, or a public projection from at least two authoritative, national news outlets that make independent election calls."

Mail-in ballots can arrive at the voting office as late as November 20th this year (depending on your state.. you still have to mail your ballot out by November 3rd, though) [0]. With so many people voting by mail this year, we might not know the election results until November 20th. I hope that election officials (and Twitter officials) will take that into account.

[0] https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voter-registration/vote-mai...