Twitter launches new tools to report covid misinformation

Users will be able to report misinformation in the same way that they can report harassment or other harmful content, starting today, via the dropdown menu at the top right of every tweet.

Users will be asked to choose whether the false statement is political, health-related, or belongs to another category.

According to The Verge report, more specific forms of misinformation, such as election-related content, are included in the politics category. Users will be able to flag Covid-19-specific misinformation under the health category.

Users will not receive any updates from the company on what happens to misleading tweets they report for the time being, though this may change in the future.

The new feature will be available to most users in the United States, Australia, and South Korea on Tuesday. Twitter stated that it plans to run this experiment for a few months before expanding it to other markets.

Twitter describes the test as an "experiment," not a fully functional feature. According to a report in TechCrunch, Twitter will monitor how users interact with the new misinformation reporting tool to see if it can be a useful tool for identifying potentially harmful misleading tweets.

Previously in 2019, the platform added the option to report false election-related tweets to help protect elections in Europe and India.

As the platform continues to test the feature, Twitter stated that not every report will be reviewed. However, the information gathered during the test will aid the company in determining how to expand the feature in the coming weeks. The test could also be used to detect tweets that contain false information and have the potential to go viral.

While the option to identify tweets as misleading is a new feature, the new option will feed reported tweets into Twitter's current enforcement mechanism, which employs a mix of human and algorithmic moderation to enforce Twitter's known policies surrounding health and political misinformation.

This procedure will also prioritise reported tweets for review. Tweets from users with large followings or tweets with unusually high levels of engagement, as well as tweets about elections and Covid-19--Twitter's two areas of focus when it comes to policing misinformation, will be prioritised for review.

According to TechCrunch, the new test is Twitter's newest attempt to rely more on its own community to detect misinformation.