In this US election cycle Twitter started flagging tweets that contained factually disputed information and blatant misinformation (code for a lie). Users are still able to see those tweet, but the label at the bottom of the tweet is meant to make people think twice about people spreading falsehoods. Twitter will now take this a step further by warning users with a prompt when they try to like such a tweet.
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If you tap the hearth icon on a tweet that’s been labelled as misleading it will trigger a prompt that encourages you to “Find out more.”
Giving context on why a labeled Tweet is misleading under our election, COVID-19, and synthetic and manipulated media rules is vital.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) November 23, 2020
These prompts helped decrease Quote Tweets of misleading information by 29% so we're expanding them to show when you tap to like a labeled Tweet. pic.twitter.com/WTK164nMfZ
The feature was initially discovered by researcher Jane Manchun Wong. The research was done on many prominent figures on the platform, most notably outgoing president Donald Trump. Since the recent election results started to turn out of his favour due to mail-in ballots that were counted last, he started tweeting a slew of unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud. Most of these were already flagged by Twitter as misinformation.
Twitter is working on misinformation warning on Likes, just like the ones for Quote Tweets / Retweets pic.twitter.com/BLlmaw5RZK
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) November 9, 2020
The warnings on those tweets showed a warning that says: “Official sources may not have called the race when this was tweeted.”
In a matter of two weeks Twitter had flagged 300,000 tweets as misleading after the US election. The feature expansion is rolling out on the web and on iOS to all users around the world this week. Android users, meanwhile, will start seeing prompts in the coming weeks.
