An election is a formal group decision-making process, where a country's population is required to vote for an individual or multiple individuals to hold public office.
Elections have been usually conducted in many countries with modern representative democracy. But since elections involve the population's perceptive, things can get biased.
This is getting more complex when it involves the internet, where information is abundance, or too much to consume.
The internet plays a big role in making information flow easier. But with that, elections can be quite tricky, as the diverse and bias thoughts of people can affect others' thoughts, to either make and destroy someone's political venture.
Twitter has long been at the forefront of gathering people's thoughts.
And here, it wants to play a safer role in elections, by improving accounts security.
In a blog post, Twitter wrote that:
To do this, Twitter is going to start informing a group of selected high-profile accounts that include Congress members, government officials, news outlets, and even individual journalist.
The social media is doing this by sending them via in-app notifications, prompting them to strengthen their password if necessary, and active two-factor authentication.
"Starting today, these accounts will be informed via an in-app notification from Twitter of some of the initial account security measures we will be requiring or strongly recommending going forward," the company said in a statement.
"While we’re requiring some accounts do this given the unique sensitivities of the election period."
In the coming weeks, Twitter is also implementing additional proactive internal security safeguards for the selected accounts, including:
- More sophisticated detections and alerts to help us, and account holders, respond rapidly to suspicious activity.
- Increased login defenses to prevent malicious account takeover attempts.
- Expedited account recovery support to ensure account security issues are resolved quickly.
According to Twitter, implementing these security measures is a critical preventative step.
Election is a crucial moment for every government. And things can get tricky, and more difficult to control the closer the date.
As more people express their opinions, information can get biases pretty quickly. And one of the very best way to swerve opinions to or from something, is by impersonating those high-profile and influential figures.
By protecting those users, Twitter is hoping that it can help stop fake information from spreading and damaging reputations.
The news came two months after Twitter suffered the biggest hack in its history, the incident where accounts of many famous companies, politicians and celebrities were compromised to promote a Bitcoin scam.