Twitter Testing Feature That Can Allow Users to Flag Misleading Content

Twitter Testing Feature That Can Allow Users to Flag 'Misleading' Content

As part of its new feature, Twitter on Tuesday announced the ability for users to flag content that they believe may contain misinformation, a problem that has only grown worse during the pandemic.

Using its safety and security account, Twitter announced that it was testing a feature that would allow users to report Tweets that appeared to be misleading - as they saw them.

Starting on Tuesday, some users in the United States, South Korea, and Australia will be able to select "it's misleading" after clicking "report tweet" if they are located in one of these countries.

Following that, users can be more specific, flagging the misleading tweet as potentially containing false information about "health," "politics," or "other."

"We're evaluating whether this is a viable strategy, so we're starting small," the San Francisco-based company explained.

Despite the fact that we may not take action on and cannot respond to every report in the experiment, your feedback will assist us in identifying trends that will allow us to improve the speed and scale of our broader misinformation work."

Twitter, like Facebook and YouTube, is frequently criticized by critics who claim that the social media platform is not doing enough to combat the spread of false information.

However, the platform does not have the resources of its Silicon Valley neighbors, and as a result, it frequently relies on experimental techniques that are less expensive than recruiting armies of moderators to moderate content.

This type of activity has increased in recent years, as Twitter has tightened its anti-misinformation policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the US presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Users who have been warned five times about spreading false information about vaccines, for example, have been blocked from Twitter since the beginning of March.

While Trump was running for president in 2020, the network began flagging his tweets with a banner warning of their misleading content, and eventually banned him from the website for inciting violence and discrediting election results.

In Conclusion

In the end, it is up to moderators to determine which content actually breaches Twitter's terms of service, but the social network has stated that it hopes to eventually implement a system that relies on both human and automated analysis to identify potentially illegal posts in the future.

Concern over COVID-19 vaccine misinformation has grown to such an extent that Vice President Joe Biden declared in July that social media platforms were responsible for "killing" people by allowing false information about the shots to spread.

He walked back his remarks to emphasize that it is the false information itself that has the potential to cause harm or even death to those who believe it.