Twitter Adds New Security Measures for High-Profile Election-Related Accounts

Twitter continues to take steps to fortify its platform with November’s U.S. presidential election in mind, and its latest security addition is aimed at high-profile, election-related accounts. The social network said the types of accounts impacted by the new security measures are: Executive Branch Congress Governors Secretaries of state Presidential […]

Twitter continues to take steps to fortify its platform with November’s U.S. presidential election in mind, and its latest security addition is aimed at high-profile, election-related accounts.

The social network said the types of accounts impacted by the new security measures are:

  • Executive Branch
  • Congress
  • Governors
  • Secretaries of state
  • Presidential campaigns
  • Political parties
  • Candidates with election labels running for the House of Representatives, the Senate or governor
  • Major U.S. news outlets and political journalists

Those accounts will be alerted to the updates via in-application notifications.

Accounts with weak password will be required to change those passwords to stronger ones the next time they login to Twitter, and the social network will enable password reset protection by default.

The latter helps prevent unauthorized password changes by requiring an account to confirm its email address or phone number in order to initiate a password reset.

Accounts on the list will also be “strongly encouraged” to implement two-factor authentication as an addition layer of security to prevent unauthorized logins.

And in the coming weeks, additional proactive internal security safeguards that will roll out for high-profile, election-related accounts include:

  • More sophisticated detections and alerts to enable Twitter and account holders to rapidly respond to suspicious activity.
  • Increased login defenses to help prevent malicious account takeover attempts.
  • Expedited account recovery support to quickly resolve account security issues.

Twitter Safety reminded users that anyone can take advantage of these security measures, even if they do not fit the criteria of accounts being required to do so.

The social network wrote in a blog post, “Voters, political candidates, elected officials and journalists rely on Twitter every day to share and find reliable news and information about the election, and we take our responsibility to them seriously. As we learn from the experience of past security incidents and implement changes, we’re also focused on keeping high-profile accounts on Twitter safe and secure during the 2020 U.S. election.”

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