Twitter recently announced that it is set to show a warning notification when users try to like a labelled tweet. The platform started showing a warning before the 2020 US presidential election when the users tried to retweet a flagged tweet. The company has now expanded a warning functionality which is rolling out on the web and iOS first and will come to Android devices in the upcoming few weeks.
Twitter said that giving context on why a labelled Tweet is misleading under their election, Covid-19 and synthetic and manipulated media rules are vital. They also stated in a tweet that the prompts helped to decrease Quote Tweets of misleading information by 29% so they are expanding them to show when users tap to like a labelled Tweet.
Twitter labelled almost 300,000 tweets under their Civic Integrity policy for content that was disputed and potentially misleading in the US election period from 27th October to 11th November. These represent 0.2% of all US election-related Tweets sent during this time period.
The company said that 456 of those Tweets were also covered by a warning message and had engagement features limited.
In the month of October, Twitter added additional warnings and restrictions on tweets with a misleading information label from US political figures, US-based accounts with more than 100,000 followers or that obtain significant engagement.
Twitter also said that people must tap through a warning to see the Tweets and after that, they will be able to Quote Tweet; likes, Retweets and replies will be turned off and these Tweets won’t be algorithmically recommended by Twitter.
When people tried to retweet tweets with a misleading information label, they saw a prompt pointing them to credible information about the topic before they were able to amplify it.