Twitter working to ramp up drive against fake news with three new warning labels; Tweet reactions could also be in works

The timeline for when the feature would be implemented, however, is not yet known.

Twitter: As microblogging site Twitter could be looking at ramping up its fight against misinformation on the platform. Over the past few months, the social media giant has been putting labels on tweets regarding the US Presidential Elections and COVID-19 to flag any misleading information or to flag the authenticity of the post. Now, security researcher Jane Manchun Wong has said that Twitter would bring in three different levels of labels to inform users about tweets containing possibly misleading information.

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The researcher said that the three labels that the social media platform might introduce include “Get the latest”, “Stay Informed” and “Misleading”. In a series of tweets, Wong demonstrated how the feature would work.

In order to demonstrate the “Get the latest label, Wong wrote, “Snorted 60 grams of dihydrogen monoxide and I’m not feeling so well,” to which Twitter added a label giving more information about water.

In a second tweet, she wrote, “In 12 hours, darkness will ascend in parts of the world. Stay tuned.” This prompted Twitter’s “Stay Informed” label which shared more information about timezones.

The third tweet written by Wong stated, “We eat. Turtles eat. Therefore we are turtles.” Twitter flagged this tweet as Misleading, and provided a guide to learn more about logical fallacies.

Twitter is working on three levels of misinformation warning labels:

“Get the latest”, “Stay Informed” and “Misleading” pic.twitter.com/0RdmMsRAEk

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) May 31, 2021

The testing of these labels was confirmed by the company’s site integrity head Yoel Roth soon after Wong’s disclosure, with Roth asking users for feedback on how it can improve this feature.

The timeline for when the feature would be implemented, however, is not yet known.

Meanwhile, a few days ago, Wong also shared that to take on its competitor Facebook, Twitter might be bringing in Tweet Reactions. Sharing a screenshot of the feature that is currently being developed, she showed reactions like “Cheer”, “Likes”, “Hmm”, “Sad” and “Haha”. While emojis for Hmm and Haha have been allocated, the site was yet to allot emojis to the Cheer and Sad reactions when she shared the information.

Twitter is working on Tweet Reactions view:

“Likes”, “Cheer”, “Hmm”, “Sad”, “Haha”

The icons for the Cheer and Sad reactions are WIP and shown as the generic heart one at the moment https://t.co/ZCBhH8z7JR pic.twitter.com/dGqq1CzIis

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) May 28, 2021