As smart as we have proved ourselves to be, human brings cannot run away from their notable set of imperfections. To make sure that we don’t forget about them, these imperfections have showed up on the surface time and time again throughout our history, but during some instances in particular, their appearances have been devastating beyond every limit. Now, such a dynamic, like you can guess, calls for some added protections, and we’ll get just what we needed once we bring dedicated regulatory bodies into the fold. The move paid off in spades, as our lives looked a lot safer than ever before. However, this utopia didn’t lost for very long, and it was all technology’s fault. Driven by a layered nature, technology was quick to let rule breakers get an edge over the regulators. This expectantly nullified all what we achieved on the back of a well-defined authority, and consequentially took us back to square one, but fortunately enough, it was really not the last power shift we would witness. The regulatory industry will come back to reestablish its dominant position on the table. In fact, the stated fact has been wholly evident across some recent events, and Twitter’s latest move should only do more to keep the trend alive.
Twitter has officially announced a new approach to handling misinformation. As per certain reports, the platform, during a crisis period, will place explicit warning labels on every piece of content that is deemed inaccurate. Apart from it, Twitter will also make significant amendments within its algorithms so to ensure they are not recommending such content to anyone. Talk about what events are included in the company’s supposed categorization of a crisis; it will cover situations from natural disasters and public health emergencies to armed conflict, therefore paying attention to everything that carries “a widespread threat to life, physical safety, health, or basic subsistence.” Many users are associating the move with Ukraine-Russia conflict, which triggered a whole stream of misinformation on social media platforms, but if details provided by Twitter are to be believed, then the company actually started working on this policy in 2021, much before the stated conflicted had even begun.
When questioned regarding how Twitter will enforce the misinformation policy on such a massive scale, the company’s head of safety and integrity, Yoel Roth responded by saying:
“To determine whether claims are misleading, we require verification from multiple credible, publicly available sources, including evidence from conflict monitoring groups, humanitarian organizations, open-source investigators, journalists, and more,”
Pic credits: Justin Sullivan