Twitter is testing a feature that allows users to flag tweets that contain misinformation. Users in the U.S., Australia, and South Korea are part of the trial, though it will likely be expanded if it’s successful. Yay, I guess?
Announced Tuesday, the test adds another category you can report tweets to. Click on those three dots in the top right corner of a tweet, choose “Report Tweet,” and the option to flag it for being “misleading” is there right between the existing options “It’s abusive or harmful” and “It expresses intent of self-harm or suicide.”
After selecting “It’s misleading,” you can then indicate whether the tweet is misleading about “politics,” “health,” or “something else.” Nonetheless, you can’t post your helpful notes like on Twitter’s crowdsourced misinformation flagging website Birdwatch Twitter’s crowdsourced misinformation flagging website Birdwatch. Instead, the report goes straight through once you select your misinformation flavor, which means I accidentally reported a tweet when testing this. Sorry about that.
https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1427706891396911107
This new category will enable Twitter users to report lousy faith tweets that spread a partial truth to further a lie, for example. Of course, anyone who has ever informed a tweet knows that this doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll see anything happen, the fact that Twitter ultimately acknowledges.
“Although we may not take action on this report or respond to you directly, we will use this report to develop new ways to reduce misleading info,” Twitter tells you when you go to report a misleading tweet. “This could include limiting its visibility, providing additional context, and creating new policies.”
The company declined to comment on Twitter on how long this trial will last and determine misleading. However, it did note that it won’t directly respond to releases under this new category because the new feature is still experimental.
As we continue killing each other through violence or indifference, social media has made many incremental attempts to mitigate misinformation, but I’m so exhausted that I can’t be hopeful anymore. There’s a new category to report nasty tweets eunder. Yay. It feels like celebrating a drowning person managing to get one extra gasp of air. It’s good. But at this point, it’s just not enough.