Ahead of the US elections, Twitter rolled out several new features including ‘read an article before retweeting’ prompt and quote tweet instead of retweeting. It started flagging disputed and potentially misleading tweets as part of the election and COVID-19 as well. Now, Twitter will show you a warning every time you try to retweet or quote a post that’s been labeled as disputed content. It is being done to curb the spread of misinformation. When you tap on the heart button on any of such tweets, the website will trigger a prompt with a “Find out more” button to pop up.
The update comes from Twitter Support account on the social media website. It said, “Giving context on why a labeled Tweet is misleading under our election, COVID-19, and synthetic and manipulated media rules is vital. 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.”
The feature was discovered earlier this month by the app experimental feature researcher Jane Manchun Wong. Her tested tweets were related to elections that said, “Official sources may not have called the race when this was tweeted.”
According to Twitter, it labeled 300,000 tweets as misleading between October 27 and November 11. Moreover, 456 of those were blocked from being retweeted or liked. These were hidden behind a warning before they could even be viewed.
The new feature is rolling out on the web and on iOS to all users around the world this week. Further, Android users will start seeing prompts in the coming weeks.
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