Twitter to label misleading information around Covid-19 vaccinations

In a bid to contain misleading information on the platform, Twitter will begin to add labels to tweets that contain misinformation related to Covid-19 vaccinations, in addition to implementing a new strike system.

“Beginning today, we will label Tweets that may contain misleading information around Covid-19 vaccinations. This is in addition to our ongoing efforts to remove the most harmful Covid-19 misleading information from Twitter,” it tweeted from the official Twitter Support account.

Since introducing its Covid-19 guidance, the microblogging platform has removed more than 8,400 tweets and challenged 11.5 million accounts worldwide, it said.

Additionally, the social media major is also introducing a strike system that determines when further enforcement action is necessary.

“We believe the strike system will help to educate the public on our policies and further reduce the spread of potentially harmful and misleading information on Twitter, particularly for repeated moderate and high-severity violations of our rules,” it said in a blog post.

In terms of labelling misleading information, the labels will first be applied by Twitter’s team members when they determine content violates its policy.

“Those assessments will be used to further inform our automated tools and to advance our proactive capacity to identify and label similar content across the service. Our goal is to eventually use both automated and human review to address content that violates our Covid-19 vaccine misinformation rules,” it said.

It will begin with English-language content first and use this same process as it works to expand to other languages and cultural contexts over time.

“Labels will appear in your set display language and may link to curated content and official public health information or the Twitter Rules,” it said.

The new strike system is similar to the platform’s recent update to the Civic Integrity Policy.

As part of the system, it will directly notify individuals when a label or required Tweet removal results in additional account-level enforcement.

“Repeated violations of the Covid-19 policy are enforced on the basis of the number of strikes an account has accrued for violations of the policy,” it explained.

One strike will not result in any account-level action. Two-three strikes will lead to a 12-hour account lock each time. Four strikes will lead to a seven-day account lock. While five or more strikes will result in a permanent suspension.

Users can submit an appeal if they believe that their account was locked or suspended in error.