(Headline USA) Twitter users will soon see new warning labels on false and misleading tweets, redesigned to make them more effective and less confusing.
However, it is unlikely to change the radical leftist bias that is pervasive in the social-media publishing company’s editorial policy, which conservatives in the US remain highly critical of following years of increasingly aggressive censorship and double standards.
The company also is unlikely to improve its approach to vetting information that it deems false, which has often been validated after the fact, as was the case with the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, President Donald Trump’s denials of Russia collusion allegations from the debunked Steele Dossier and the now widely accepted lab-leak theory for the Wuhan coronavirus.
Twitter has falsely labeled such statements of fact as misinformation or has misleadingly contextualized them to create its own misinformation in doing so.
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The new labels, which the company has been testing since July, are an update from those Twitter used for supposed election misinformation before and after the 2020 presidential contest.
Those, too, occupy a nebulous realm in which leftist propaganda has blurred the line of fact and fiction. While much evidence exists to support valid suspicious of election fraud based on corruptions of the mail-in voting system and a loosening of ballot-counting standards, other allegations made in the wake of the election cannot be supported with concrete evidence. Leftists have sought to conflate the two together as one giant conspiracy.
The redesign launching worldwide on Tuesday is an attempt to make them more useful and easier to notice, among other things.
Twitter only labels three types of misinformation: “manipulated media,” such as videos and audio that have been deceptively altered in ways that could cause real-world harm; election and voting-related misinformation and false or misleading tweets related to COVID-19.
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The new designs added orange and red to the labels so they stand out more than the old version, which was blue and blended in with Twitter’s color scheme. While this can help, Twitter said its tests showed that if a label is too eye-catching, it leads to more people to retweet and reply to the original tweet.
Twitter said Tuesday the redesigned labels showed a 17% increase in “click-through-rate,” which means that more people clicked on the redesigned labels to read the information debunking false or misleading tweets.
Misleading tweets that got the redesigned label—with an orange icon and the words “stay informed” were also less likely to be retweeted or liked than those with the original labels.
Tweets with more serious misinformation—for instance, a tweet claiming that vaccines cause autism—will get a stronger label, with the word “misleading” and a red exclamation point. It won’t be possible to reply to, like or retweet these messages.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
