Twitter will now display labels on liking disputed tweets

Starting October, the San Francisco-based social networking company introduced the labeling feature to tweets related to the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, to curb spread of misinformation.

November 24, 2020 01:25 pm | Updated 01:33 pm IST

The number of Quote Tweets of the labeled tweets witnessed a 29% decrease due to prompts sent by Twitter, the company said.

The number of Quote Tweets of the labeled tweets witnessed a 29% decrease due to prompts sent by Twitter, the company said.

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Twitter on Tuesday said it will display a label if a user hits 'like' on a disputed tweet.

The warning message will prompt users to get more information of the tweet before sharing it on the platform, Twitter Support explained in a tweet.

Starting October, the San Francisco-based social networking company introduced the labeling feature to tweets related to the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, to curb spread of misinformation.

Misleading tweets including officials claiming election win before its being authoritatively called was labeled, and users were directed to the official U.S. Election Twitter page.

Also read | Twitter’s ‘Fleets’ aren’t disappearing after 24 hours

The social networking platform labeled nearly 300,000 potentially misleading tweets between October 27 and November 11. This represented nearly 0.2% of all US election-related tweets sent during this time period, Twitter said in a statement.

Twitter also said more than 450 tweets were covered by a warning message and had engagement features restricted, including limitation on retweeting. The number of Quote Tweets of the labeled tweets witnessed a 29% decrease due to prompts sent by Twitter, the company said.

Twitter also stopped providing 'liked by' and 'followed by' recommendations during this period. Since this update did not cause a significant change in the spread of misleading information, Twitter reverted the change.

The company also said adding descriptions to trending topics helped stop the spread of misinformation.

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