Twitter wants to take on misinformation with brightly colored banners and a community system
What you need to know
- Twitter is testing a few tools to help combat misinformation on its platform.
- One version would highlight tweets that are false or misleading with bright orange banners and point users to rebuttals from fact checkers.
- The firm plans to roll these out on March 5th.
When it comes to Twitter and truth, the firm has attempted to sit on the fence as much as it can while doing its best to appease critics. To prevent itself from having to individually vet campaign ads, Twitter banned them from its platform entirely, for example.
Now, as reported by NBC News, the firm is tackling misinformation wholesale from a different angle. The firm plans to add brightly colored, eye-catching labels to identify lies and misinformation posted by politicians and public figures.
According to the NBC report, Twitter confirmed the plan and demo were showing off a possible iteration of its new misinformation policy. It may not look exactly like that, but the end result would be the same.
As per NBC:
Another tool Twitter is testing is a points based community system.
Twitter has been (not unfairly) critiqued as a hotbed of hoaxes, trolls, and misinformation over the past few years, and the company is well aware of the reputation that it has cultivated for itself. With this move, at the very least, it'll help claw back some trust in social media's ability to self regulate.
Twitter: Everything you need to know
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