Washington: Twitter users will now see a warning label on false and misleading tweets. This step has been taken to make the social media platform more effective and less misleading. The company had been working on this warning ‘label’ since July. The ‘labels’ containing election-related misinformation have been updated before and after the 2020 US Presidential Elections. Those ‘labels’ were criticized for not doing enough to stop people from spreading lies.
These new warning ‘labels’ were released around the world on Tuesday, aiming to ensure easy detection of misinformation. Experts say such ‘labels’ can be helpful to users, and they will ease the more difficult task of ‘content moderation’ for the social media platform..ie deciding whether posts that spread conspiracy and lies, Whether to delete photos and videos.
Twitter only ‘labels’ three types of misinformation, “posts that distort fact”, such as intentionally tampering with any video and audio to be harmful to the real world, elections, or Incorrect information related to voting, and wrong and misleading information related to Kovid-19. The updated design incorporates ‘Orange Label’ and ‘Red Label’ to make them more effective than the earlier ‘Label’.
Earlier the color of the ‘label’ was blue, which matches the color of Twitter. Twitter said experiments have shown that if the color is simply eye-catching, it can help people identify the actual tweet. The company said that there was a 17 percent increase in the rate of the information clicked on these ‘labels’, meaning more people tried to get information about false and misleading tweets using the new ‘label’.
According to the company, deceptive tweets will be marked with an ‘orange label’, and tweets with severely misinformed information, such as claiming to have ‘autism’ from vaccines, will be marked ‘red label’. It will not be possible to reply to, or ‘like and retweet’ a ‘Red Label’ Tweet.
