Twitter brings back special labels for profiles of political candidates

If you’ve ever seen a Twitter account and wondered if it belonged to someone who’s running for public office, but you didn’t feel like reading their bio or Googling them, this is a great week for you.

Twitter announced on Thursday it would start rolling out special candidate labels for “eligible US general election candidates.” This is actually the return of a feature Twitter started playing with during the 2018 U.S. congressional midterms. Twitter told us back in December they would be brought back  for candidates who went through a verification process.

According to Twitter, this round of badges can only apply to “candidates running for US House of Representatives, US Senate, or Governor in the 2020 US election who have qualified for the general election ballot.” The little badge will tell you pertinent information on both their profile pages and on their tweets.

For example, North Carolina governor Roy Cooper is up for reelection this fall. If you go to his profile right now, this is what you see:

It wasn’t exactly world-changing when Twitter did it the first time and that’s still true. The information Twitter is surfacing here is usually also present in the candidates’ bios, but hey, sometimes it isn’t. Cooper doesn’t mention that he’s running for reelection in his bio, but thanks to the badge, I know that now. Neat!

This isn’t likely to change your life, but it can’t hurt, especially in the age of bots and Russian misinformation campaigns.