Ahead of US midterms, Twitter announces the use of labels yet again to tackle misinformation
Trump had been banned under this policy by Twitter
Ahead of the crucial November midterm election in the US, social media giant Twitterannounced that it will be taking steps, akin to the 2020 US Presidential elections to combat misinformation and misleading claims, in a blog post, released on Thursday.
Reportedly, Twitter stated that it was reactivating its Civic Integrity Policy, under which tweets with misleading claims intended to undermine public confidence in an election will be labelled with links to credible information or helpful context.
Twitter stated that its policy was first introduced in 2018 and will be applied to all 435 seats and 100 seats that are up for grabs in the US House of Representatives and US Senate respectively.
Twitter stated that it had tested new misleading information labels last year and the results were encouraging.
"The new labels increased click-through rates by 17per cent, meaning more people were clicking labels to read debunking content. We also saw notable decreases in engagement with Tweets labelled with the new design: -13 per cent in replies, -10 per cent in Retweets and -15 per cent in likes," read the statement.
One of the other initiatives announced by Twitter included the catchphrase 'prebunks'. Simply put, Twitter will attempt to get ahead of misleading narratives and debunk the lies before they could spread further.
Mixed response from the netizens
However, Twitter's announcement was met with mixed responses. The conservative voices claimed that the microblogging platform may act as the judge, jury and executioner once again and attempt to meddle with the electoral process.
It is pertinent to note that in the run-up to US Presidential elections, Twitter, on multiple occasions had flagged tweets by former President Donald Trump.
Moreover, after the events of January 6, Trump was banned for life from the platform, citing the risk of 'further incitement of violence.
The free speech advocates believe that Twitter's policies are arbitrary and often lean towards the Democrats and liberals.
Meanwhile, the online misinformation experts, who often castigate social media platforms for not doing enough to cull hate speech and misinformation are seemingly satisfied with Twitter's response.
(With inputs from agencies)
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