New warning flags on fraudulent and misleading tweets will be shown to Twitter users soon, updated to be more effective and less confusing.
The labels, which Twitter has been testing since July, are an upgrade over the ones it deployed for election misinformation in the run-up to and during the 2020 presidential election. Those labels were chastised for failing to do more to prevent people from spreading clear lies.
The revamp, which goes live worldwide on Tuesday, aims to make them more useful and noticeable, among other things.
According to experts, such labels, which are also employed by Facebook, can be beneficial to users. However, they may help social media sites to avoid the more onerous task of content moderation, which involves selecting whether or not to remove posts, photographs, or videos that disseminate conspiracies and lies.
Only three categories of misinformation are labelled on Twitter: “manipulated media,” such as films and audio that have been deliberately altered in ways that could cause real-world harm; election and voting-related misinformation; and incorrect or misleading COVID-19 tweets.
The new labels use orange and red to stick out more than the previous version, which was blue and blended nicely with Twitter’s colour scheme. While this can be beneficial, Twitter claims that if a label is too appealing, more people will retweet and comment to the original message.
Twitter stated Tuesday that the revised labels saw a 17 percent rise in “click-through-rate,” which means that more users read the material refuting erroneous or misleading tweets by clicking on the updated labels.
Tweets with the new label — an orange emblem and the words “keep informed” — were also less likely to be retweeted or liked than those with the old labelling.
Tweets that contain more significant disinformation, such as one saying that vaccines cause autism, will be marked with the word “misleading” and a red exclamation point. These messages will not be able to be replied to, liked, or retweeted.
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