Twitter is taking its campaign of labeling tweets that the site believes contain “misinformation” about the 2020 election to the next level. Now the platform plans to send users warnings if they attempt to “like” labeled tweets.
The Verge reports that ahead of the 2020 election, Twitter began warning users if they attempted to retweet a tweet that the site had labeled as including misleading information. Now Twitter plans to expand the warning functionality to warn users when they attempt to like a labeled tweet.
Twitter noted that adding a warning decreased quote tweets of misleading information by 29 percent, but as Breitbart News reported, it also decreased activity on the platform overall. The platform announced plans to warn users about liking labeled tweets in a post from its Support account:
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. pic.twitter.com/WTK164nMfZ
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) November 23, 2020
The warnings before retweets and likes on labeled tweets are just one of a few restrictions that Twitter has placed on its platform recently in an attempt to reduce the spread of misinformation. When users attempt to retweet a tweet now, Twitter automatically opens a new window to compose a quote tweet instead of immediately sharing that tweet with the user’s followers.
Breitbart News reported earlier this month that Twitter announced that it had successfully curbed the spread of misinformation on its platform during the presidential election. It accomplished this task by curbing the spread of all information on the platform.
Twitter stated that quote tweets, which aimed to encourage users to add more context to posts, were up by 26 percent as a result of the prompt, and regular retweets were down by 23 percent. Quote tweets and retweets combined were down by 20 percent in total.
Twitter proudly stated: “This change slowed the spread of misleading information by virtue of an overall reduction in the amount of sharing on the service.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address [email protected]
