Twitter will start labelling tweets that violate its COVID-19 guidance policy – this essentially includes content containing misinformation about the virus as well as vaccines.
Since introducing its COVID-19 guidance, Twitter has removed more than 8,400 Tweets and challenged 11.5 million accounts worldwide.
The new labels are expected to include links to official public health information or the Twitter rules – which is an attempt by the social platform to help users find credible info and partner with the experts.
In an official statement, Twitter says “we will begin applying labels to Tweets that may contain misleading information about COVID-19 vaccines, in addition to our continued efforts to remove the most harmful COVID-19 misleading information from the service.”
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Here’s what the label will look like:
Twitter is also introducing a strike system that it hopes will slow down the spread of misinformation.
“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.”
Repeated violations are enforced on the basis of the number of strikes an account has received. Strikes are punished as follows:
- One strike: no account-level action
- Two strikes: 12-hour account lock
- Three strikes: 12-hour account lock
- Four strikes: 7-day account lock
- Five or more strikes: permanent suspension
Users will be notified directly when “a label or required Tweet removal results in additional account-level enforcement”.
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