Twitter may slow down spread of misinformation through this upcoming feature

Twitter is making honest attempts to keep it safe for users who often fall to the trap of misinformation. The social media giant is expanding its work on ‘misinformation’ labels for misleading tweets. A new feature is in works with which a ‘misleading information’ label will pop up every time a user interacts with a tweet that may have misinformation.

The feature was unearthed by reverse engineer Jane Manchun who confirmed that although the new feature that is yet to be live does not prevent the user to ‘like’ the tweet but warns them with the misinformation label thus slowing down its reach.

A similar kind of feature is already present where when a user attempts to retweet a post labelled misinformation, the user receives a prompt pointing them to credible information first. Some of these alterations were announced in the final weeks of the U.S presidential campaign. This new feature is a continuation of all these measures Twitter is taking to restrict the spread of misinformation.

Twitter has confirmed the feature discovered by Wong but has not given a definite time frame for its rollout.

This new feature will act as a speed-breaker for misinformation going viral with retweets and likes as it will make users pause and think before amplifying any content. Before the US Election day, Twitter also applied aggressive warnings and restrictions on tweets of US political figures and campaigners and accounts of users that have a standard following. Tweets claiming premature victory appeared on the timeline with aggressive warnings, a feature designed keeping Donald Trumps’ tweets in mind.

The US elections have highlighted the problem of the spread of misinformation but it continues to remain a big problem with information and opinion sharing on social media. Twitter at its end is trying to not let these tweets labelled as misinformation appear on search or injected into user timelines even when they do not follow the accounts.