Article by LABC
Twitter keeps on experimenting new ways to limit the spread of fake news. In the middle of August the company announced the launch of a new pilot function: small groups of users in the United States, Australia and South Korea will be able to report tweets containing misinformation. They would be allowed to report false or misleading content, using the same procedure as for reporting harassment or other harmful content, by clicking on the drop-down menu at the top right of each tweet.
Users will be asked to select whether the misleading comment is political, health-related or falls into another category (“Something else”). The ‘political’ category includes more specific forms of misinformation such as election-related content, while the ‘health’ category will also include an option for users to report misinformation about Covid-19.
Twitter has not currently specified how many users will have access to the new feature. “We’re evaluating whether this is an effective approach, so let’s start small,” the company wrote, adding also “We may not take action on and cannot respond to each report in the experiment, but your input will help us identify trends so that we can improve the speed and scale of our broader misinformation work”. Answering to a user who was asking if this approach will be introduced also in European Countries, they said “In this experimental stage, we plan to learn from a small, geographically diverse set of regions before scaling globally to other areas!”
From the Imedial Project’s partnership, we are looking forward to having the same measures available in Europe!