Today, Thursday, Twitter announced a new policy to deal with misinformation during crises
Under the new policy, tweets labeled as misinformation won’t necessarily be deleted or banned, but they will be masked, and banned from algorithmic promotion.
However, hidden tweets will be added with a warning asking users to click a button before viewing the tweet (similar to the current ratings of explicit images).
Currently, the new policy will only apply to tweets related to the international armed conflict, and may eventually include other crises, such as natural disasters and public health emergencies.
“Content moderation is about more than leaving or removing content, and we’ve expanded the actions we may take to ensure that they are commensurate with the severity of the potential harm,” Twitter Safety and Integrity Head Uriel Roth said in an official blog.
We’ve been refining our approach to crisis misinformation, drawing on input from global experts and human rights organizations. As part of this new framework, we’ll start adding warning notices on high visibility misleading Tweets related to the war in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/fr0NGleJXP
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) May 19, 2022
The new policy comes at a sensitive time for Twitter, as the company’s authorized sale to billionaire Elon Musk is in a perplexing predicament.
Musk has pledged to scale back the company’s moderation regimes in favor of an extremist view of free speech, but with his claims that the deal is pending an investigation into the spread of fake accounts on the Twitter platform, it is unclear when or how his ideas will be implemented.