Combatting misinformation is an unending battle for social networks, with COVID-19 misinformation currently the big target. Twitter has today announced a new feature which will allow users to report tweets which potentially contain misleading information.
The feature allows users to report tweets for being misleading specifically for Health or Politics, or a generic ‘Something Else’. The feature is currently being tested here in Australia, as well as in the US and South Korea, with tweets reported during this period able to report tweets for being misleading.
The option to report Tweets as containing misinformation is available on both Desktop and Mobile, with the ‘Report Tweet’ option available in the drop-down menu. You can then find the ‘It’s Misleading’ option under the Abusive or Harmful, Spam and other issues.
Once you select the misleading information option you can clarify further what the tweet is about, Political information, Health or Something Else. If you choose politics you can further state that it’s about election information or something else, while the Health option lets you specify whether it’s COVID-19 related or something else.
It’s a welcome feature for fighting against the swathes of misinformation out there, and the scale of tweets can be hard to manage so this is a step in the right direction. Previously Twitter has rolled out labels for tweets which may contain information related to COVID-19, however this gives some personal agency to Twitter users wanting to report misinformation.
The feature is now live, so if you see some misinformation feel free to report it.
