On Monday, Twitter announced its plan to introduce a new strike system to halt the spread of misinformation on the platform. The social media platform will start labelling tweets that “may contain misleading information about COVID-19 vaccines” and remove any that violate Twitter guidelines. The company has already removed thousands of tweets and examined over 11.5 million accounts that have been linked to the spread of false information on the platform.
The plan is to use human employees to review whether or not tweets violate the company policy. These will then be used to train automated tools and algorithms to detect and filter out misinformation. Twitter has stated it plans to use “both automated and human review to address content that violates our COVID-19 vaccine misinformation rules.” This way, anyone who spreads fake vaccine information will receive a ‘strike’. Twitter will alert users each time they receive a strike. Two strikes will result in a 12-hour account lock, three strikes a 24-hour ban and four strikes will lock the account for a week. The company is aware this won’t deter bots, however they hope it will “educate” users on “on why certain content breaks our rules so they have the opportunity to further consider their behaviour and their impact on the public conversation.”
