Civic integrity

Political advertising

In 2019, Twitter began globally prohibiting the promotion of political content. We don’t allow ads of any type by candidates, political parties, or elected or appointed government officials. We made this decision based on our belief that political message reach should be earned, not bought.

You can find more on these policies on our political content policy page, as well as our political content FAQs page.

Government, state-affiliated media, and candidate labels

Twitter provides an unmatched way to connect with — and directly speak to — public officials and representatives. To protect that discourse, below is an overview of the accounts we label:

1. Accounts of key government officials, including foreign ministers, institutional entities, ambassadors, official spokespeople, and key diplomatic leaders
2. Accounts belonging to state-affiliated media entities, their editors-in-chief, and/or their senior staff
3. Accounts belonging to specified candidates

At this time, our focus is on senior officials and entities who are the official voice of the state abroad.

Civic integrity policy

When we find Tweets containing misleading information about a civic process, we may place a label on the Tweet. This label will allow you to find related information from credible sources, such as election officials. In certain cases, we may require you to remove the Tweet or temporarily lock you out of your account.

Prompts when interacting with a misleading Tweet

Labeled Tweets in violation of our misleading information policies trigger a prompt. These prompts add an additional check for misleading Tweets so that people can better decide whether or not to amplify those Tweets with their followers.

News article prompts

We’ve also begun prompting people on Twitter when they attempt to Retweet an article they haven’t actually opened and read. Our prompts remind people to read it before they Retweet it.

Trusted information

We look to trusted experts who can provide relevant, authoritative information to the market so that we can find and connect you with the most up-to-date content. It’s important for us to curate and elevate the voices of trusted experts so you can trust that you’ll get accurate information on the subject from a verified professional when you come to Twitter.

We consider a trusted expert someone who has established a track record of reliably sharing accurate information on the subject and/or has a verified professional connection to an authoritative source.

We’re always looking for ways to strengthen Twitter against attempted manipulation, malicious automated accounts, and spam, as well as other activities that violate our Terms of Service.

Account security

Our team works hard to improve how we protect and secure the accounts of government officials, candidates for office, journalists, and other people on Twitter integral to elections globally.

We’ve implemented enhanced account protections, created resources for high-priority accounts, and provided recommendations for enhanced account security.

We aim to be open and transparent about the steps we take and actively incorporate your feedback into our practices.

Information operations

Transparency and openness are deep-seated values at the heart of Twitter. In line with our strong values of transparency, we’ve made an archive of our state-backed operations available to everyone. We want to empower academic and public understanding of information operations around the world, so we’ve released all the accounts and related content that we’ve found on our service since 2016, and we continue to release new data as we detect new activities.

To access our datasets, visit the Twitter Transparency Report.

Historical reports and analysis

• 2018 Midterm Reports (PDF)
• Twitter and the 2019 European Elections (PDF)
• July - December 2020 Transparency Report
• 2020 Global Impact Report (PDF)