Twitter ready to battle the fake news of politicians
The microblogging platform will soon experiment with a system to report politicians’ tweets deemed dangerously misleading. There is a badge and score system for users.
The 2016 US presidential election was probably the darkest and lowest moment in the spread of online disinformation, so much so that social networks felt the need to devise methods to prevent similar episodes from happening again with the 2020 presidential election.
It is in this vein that the latest idea of Twitter fits in, which NBC News discovered from a demo released by the company. Twitter plans to experiment, probably as early as March, with a system for labeling politicians ” dangerously misleading ” tweets.
It would only be one of the several systems that the microblogging platform intends to experiment in the immediate future: ” We are exploring a series of ways to deal with disinformation and make more context available for tweets on Twitter. Disinformation is a problem critical, and we will test various ways to deal with it, ” Twitter told NBC News. We also recall that Twitter recently banned the spread of deep fakes always in an attempt to battle disinformation.
The modalities are not entirely clear: it seems that users can earn points and mature by the right to receive a sort of ” community badge “ to provide the right context to misleading tweets. Users are asked to indicate whether it is ” probable ” or ” unlikely ” that a given tweet is ” dangerously misleading. ”
Twitter then asks the user to indicate, according to him, what percentage of users would respond the same thing on a scale from 1 to 100 and to provide an explanation. It is not clear how the user can collect the points and earn the ” community badge. ”
In the circulated images, we see, for example, a tweet by Bernie Sanders in which he declares that 40% of the firearms in the USA are sold without the necessary controls. The tweet is indicated in orange as ” dangerously misleading.”
Below the label, you can see the members who have earned the community badge, a small green shield, providing more information to contextualize the declaration. And in the specific case, Sanders’ position was based on a 1997 study, where a more recent study indicates that the proportion has dropped to 22%.
Will it be the right way? If crowdsourced information has its problems, on the other hand, it must be considered that on Twitter, there is the active participation of users, journalists, and fact-checking agencies that fight the diffusion of tendentious information, polarizing and misleading especially by politicians. Maybe this is a system that will need some small adjustment while traveling, but it seems to be an encouraging first step in battling a dangerous scourge of this historical era.
