View from our condo in Siesta Key is not bad at all
Twitter plans misinfo labels, but are they a good idea?
Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer
As part of its ongoing efforts to deal with the spread of misinformation on its platform, Twitter is experimenting with adding colored labels that would appear directly beneath any inaccurate statements posted by politicians and other public figures, according to a leaked demo of new features sent recently to NBC. The labels would contain fact-checks either by Facebook’s team of third-party checkers, or by journalists and other users who agreed to participate in a kind of “community reports” crowdsourcing effort.
Twitter later confirmed to the network that the leaked demo (which was accessed via a publicly available website), is one possible version of a new policy aimed at curbing the spread of misinformation. The original NBC News report said the new features would be rolling out on March 5, but the story was later updated to say Twitter doesn’t have plans to roll out the labels — or any other misinformation features — on any specific date. Whether such a feature would actually help curb misinformation even if it was rolled out, meanwhile, is still an open question.
After NBC ran its report, communications researcher Rebekah Tromble of George Washington University posted a tweet that said: “Please, @Twitter, do NOT do this. Do NOT add this massive flag. As @shannimcg and I argued, Facebook already made this mistake. This will only increase the circulation of false info.” Tromble included a link to a research paper that she and a colleague wrote last year about social-network design, which described how Facebook tried a similar type of misinformation flag, and later scrapped the feature because it was concerned that the flags would backfire and made the problem worse. Research, the company said, appeared to show that highlighting that something was inaccurate in some cases made users believe it even more, instead of less, something that has come to be known as the “backfire effect.” But a Facebook researcher responded and said that further research shows the backfire effect is not as strong as it was once believed to be.
Continue reading “Twitter plans misinfo labels, but are they a good idea?”Maybe if I sit really still and wait, that squirrel will come back down the tree into my mouth
