Twitter is one of the few major social media companies that have taken an active approach towards preventing the spread of misinformation on its platform. Recently they were testing new ways to label potentially harmfully misleading tweets with warning labels and yesterday they announced new labels and warnings to prevent COVID-19 related misleading information from spreading.
Twitter will be rolling out these labels to all relevant tweets, including those that were tweeted from before. The label will also provide a link to a Twitter-curated page or an external trusted source that will provide more information on the topic contained in the tweet.
Along with labels, Twitter may also add warnings to the tweet depending on its tendency to incite harm and type of misleading information.
Twitter has classified three types of warnings and will take action accordingly:
- Misleading information which include statements or assertions that have been confirmed to be false or misleading by subject-matter experts, such as public health authorities.
- Disputed claims — statements or assertions in which the accuracy, truthfulness, or credibility of the claim is contested or unknown.
- Unverified claims — information (which could be true or false) that is unconfirmed at the time it is shared.