Twitter unveils redesigned warning labels for ‘misinformation’

Washington: In a bid to check falsehood, Twitter has started rolling out new warning labels on false and misleading tweets and redesigned the labels to make them more effective and less confusing. 

The company has been testing the labels since July 2021. Those labels drew criticism for not doing enough to keep people from spreading obvious falsehoods. 

The company launched the redesigned label worldwide on Tuesday in an attempt to make them more useful and easier to notice.

As per experts, such labels can be quite helpful to 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.

Twitter, however, labels only three types of misinformation: ‘manipulated media, such as videos and audio that have been deceptively altered in ways that could cause real-world harm; election and voting-related misinformation and false or misleading tweets related to COVID-19. 

Tweets with more serious misinformation for instance, a tweet claiming that vaccines cause autism will get a stronger label, with the word misleading and a red exclamation point.

The new designs added orange and red to the labels so they stand out more than the old version, which was blue and blended in with Twitter’s colour scheme. 

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.

Moreover, misleading tweets that got the redesigned label with an orange icon and the words “stay informed” were also less likely to be retweeted or liked than those with the original labels.