You can't vote by text, no matter what Twitter tells you

There are a few ways to vote this year: you can go to a polling place in person on election day. In many states, you can vote early (and change your vote if you change your mind before Election Day). You can mail in an absentee ballot. But you can't vote by text message.

Nevertheless, some people, whose accounts have considerable followings, are trying to tweet fake ads that say you can. They're targeted at Clinton voters (specifically, black and Spanish-speaking voters), they're using Clinton campaign logos, they claim to be paid for by "Hillary for President 2016," and they're totally not true.

Twitter user @mcnees decided to report them to Twitter Support, and guess what happened?

Yep, Twitter said it was not a violation of its rules to post intentionally misleading fake ads designed to disenfranchise certain voters. Which, as McNees pointed out in a follow-up tweet, is Twitter's right even if it doesn't look particularly good for a company to allow attempts at voter suppression. Sure enough, following a few hours of outcry, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said it had been "fixed."

And McNees said he'd received a second email from Twitter saying that yes, it is a violation of its terms of service to impersonate a political campaign and then lie. Its crack support team just didn't apparently realize that when it reviewed McNees' report the first time around. Twitter Support misses a lot of violations, unless those violations are posting GIFs from the Olympics, in which case it acts swiftly and severely.

Sure enough, the two Twitter accounts McNees reported were suspended, though one was able to return after a brief "time out" and after removing the text voting tweet (she is currently maintaining that her tweets are "legit," despite abundant evidence that at least one of them was not). Twitter users who do try to vote for Clinton by texting 59925 are now met with a message that sort of clears things up: it says the "ads" are not real nor approved by the Clinton campaign, but doesn't specifically say that voting by text message is impossible. So, just in case there's still any confusion: you can't vote by text. Please do not do this.

The post You Can't Vote By Text, No Matter What Twitter Tells You appeared first on Vocativ.