Twitter is reportedly set to tackle misinformation with warning labels.
The social media site is planning on incorporating a new tiered warning label system that will flag tweets that don’t contain facts, with harsher labels being attached to messages that are sharing the most dangerous misinformation.
According to app researcher Jane Manchun Wong, Twitter is testing three new labels titled ‘Get the Latest’, ‘Stay Informed’, and ‘Misleading’.
How accurate a tweet is determines if Twitter’s systems use one of these three labels, each of which includes a prompt directing users to additional information.
Jane – who reverse engineers popular apps to uncover features still in development – showed screenshots of three tweets she had made on her account which had triggered each of the new labels.
In one tweet, she wrote: “Snorted 60 grams of dihydrogen monoxide and I’m not feeling so well now”, which triggered the “Get the latest” label with information about water.
And a second tweet which read: “In 12 hours, darkness will ascend in parts of the world. Stay tuned”, was flagged with the “Stay Informed” label to prompt users to learn more about the concept of time zones.
Jane’s third tweet read: “We eat. Turtles eat. Therefore we are turtles”, and Twitter labelled it as “Misleading”, as it told users the tweet was a logical fallacy.
The feature is designed to help stop the spread of misinformation, but it could also be used to provide important context for issues that may be too nuanced to fit in Twitter’s 280-character limit.
As of the time of writing it’s unclear when or if the feature will launch in full, or whether there would be any consequences for users caught repeatedly posting misinformation.
