Twitter is one of those platforms that’s severely fighting to fend off misinformation. With 300 million monthly active users, Twitter is fairly a better place to spread any fake information. So the company is trailing with a new approach by labeling a tweet regarding COVID-19 to be misleading, even before it’s seen by users. It will be rolled out from today and will be applied to tweets from earlier.
Though the platform is having limited userbase when compared to other social platforms, it’s a platform for many celebrities and authoritative personnel. This leads to many engagements, thus more chances of spreading fake news. And Twitter’s new initiative is just another step in curbing this.
The New Approach
This new approach will be labeling and displaying a message on a tweet as Some or all of the content of this tweet conflicts with public health experts’ guidance regarding COVID-19. If there’s media content, it will be masked with this label and directs users with a link to official COVID-19 information from authentic sources.
Breaking down this approach, Twitter will be dividing the content of a tweet under three categories as below:
- Misleading information: This is the type of content that’s called by subject matter experts to be fake.
- Disputed Claims: Type of content that has its source questionable or unknown.
- Unverified claims: Type of content that’s yet to be verified.
The platform is feeding its machines to detect these types of tweets that may have a high possible reach first. These will be verified by Twitter in association with its partners like subject matter experts or officials directly. This labeling is first applied to curb misleading information from unknown media earlier this year and is now rolled to COVID-19 information as it’s sensitive now.
Upon this feature rollout, Twitter said, “Serving the public conversation remains our overarching mission, and we’ll keep working to build tools and offer context so that people can find credible and authentic information on Twitter.”
Source: Twitter
