After the success of initial testing of its new manual reporting option, which enables users to flag Tweets that contain potentially misleading claims, Twitter has decided to expand the test to more regions, with users in Brazil, the Philippines, and Spain now set also to gain access.

Launched in August last year, the latest in Twitter’s anti-misinformation arsenal focused on audience trends and perceptions as a means to identify common issues with the platform and as to what people were compelled to report, citing things they don’t want to see.

Black Flag

Added is a new ‘It’s misleading’ option to your Tweet reporting tools, providing you with more capacity to flag concerning claims. While it’s not a guaranteed way to detect and remove misleading content. But again, the focus here is not so much on direct enforcement, but more on the broader trends based on how many people report certain Tweets and what they report.

As Twitter explained back then:

“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. This could include limiting its visibility, providing additional context, and creating new policies.”

So, what this basically tells us is that if, say, a hundred people report the same Tweet for ‘political misinformation’, then that’ll likely catch Twitter’s eye, helping to prompt it as to what people wouldn’t want to see and how they would want the platform to respond, even if the said content doesn’t necessarily violate current regulations.

It’s really more a research tool in this case, rather than as a legitimate enforcement option, which is a better approach since enabling users to dictate removals via mass-reporting is very much subject to misuse and might end up inciting various instances of ‘Dogpiling’.

Initial testing has also helped highlight potential risks, with the head of site integrity Yoel Roth explaining:

“On average, only about 10% of misinfo reports were actionable -compared to 20-30% for other policy areas. A key driver of this was “off-topic” reports that don’t contain misinfo at all.”

To simplify, a lot of Tweets reported through the option were not an actual concern, highlighting the challenge of the option being used for hard enforcement.

So while it may not be the best avenue to initiate direct action for each reported Tweet, as a research tool, manual reporting has at least helped Twitter determine more areas of focus, contributing to its broader effort to eliminate misinformation within its network.

The Wrap

Widespread misinformation has always been a challenge with Twitter, now more than ever because of ‘bots’. Various researches have indicated that Twitter bots are key amplifiers of misinformation and political biases. One example is the 2020 Australian Bushfire Crisis, where Queensland University researchers uncovered a massive network of Twitter bots that have been spreading misinformation about the crisis. Other investigations have also revealed that bot profiles, at times, contribute up to 60% of Tweet activity around trend events.

Such insight could prove valuable in aiding Twitter to rid its network of fallacious and misleading bot activity, which, in turn, will make the platform more stable and trustworthy, legitimately improving engagement rates and audience perception, which is what it needs right now to meet its ambitious user and revenue goals. It’s still a pretty long way to go for Twitter, but at least things seem to be coming along.

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Sources 

https://bit.ly/3IhVqGX