Twitter users will soon see new warning labels on false and misleading tweets, redesigned to make them more effective and less confusing.
The label, which the agency has been testing since July, are update from those twitter used for election misinformation before and after the 2020 presidential contest. Those labels drew criticism for not doing enough to keep people from spreading obvious falsehoods.
The redesigned warning labels launching worldwide on Tuesday is an attempt to make them more useful and earlier to notice, among other things.
Expert says such labels, used by Facebook as well, can be helpful to other users. But they can also allow social media platforms to sidestep the more difficult work of content moderation that is, deciding whether or not to remove posts, photos and videos that spread conspiracies and falsehoods.
The new design added orange and red to labels so they stand out more than the old model which was blue and blended in with twitter color scheme. While this can help, twitter said its tests showed that if a label is too eye-catching, it leads to more people to re-tweet and reply to the original tweet.
Twitter said Tuesday the redesigned labels showed a 17% increase in click through rate which means that more people clicked on the redesigned labels to read the information debunking false or misleading tweets.
Tweets with more serious misinformation for instance, a tweet claiming that vaccines cause autism will get a stronger label, with the word misleading and red exclamation point. It won’t be possible to reply to, like or Re-tweet these messages.
