Australian Twitter users will be allowed to report potentially misleading content as part of a new experiment in monitoring misinformation on the platform.
Twitter users from Wednesday will be able to flag tweets that seem misleading, via a new option on the platform’s content reporting mechanism.
The option to report misleading content is being trialled in three countries – the US, South Korea and Australia – for about a month.
The trial will allow Twitter to gather data and assess whether user reporting can usefully inform attempts to identify and curb misinformation in real time.
Twitter also hopes it will be able to analyse the reported data to better understand the origins of misinformation, identify it early, and take action before it snowballs out of control.
The system will face obvious difficulties. Concepts of “misleading content” and “misinformation” can be broad and open to interpretation, often according to political belief, Twitter says.
Reporting functions can also be misused or gamed to wrongly target users or specific content.
Twitter will also on Wednesday reactivate prompts in users’ timelines in 14 countries, including Australia, to give them country-specific Covid vaccine information.
The prompts direct users to country-specific Moments examining vaccine safety, effectiveness, distribution plans, and vaccine availability.
Earlier this year, Facebook, Twitter and other tech giants adopted an industry code of practice designed to limit the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
The code, developed by industry organisation Digi, required signatories to develop a process for identifying, reviewing and removing misinformation and disinformation.
It faced immediate criticism for its weakness and opt-in nature, and the Australian government did not rule out taking tougher action against the tech giants if it failed to work.
“The Morrison government will be watching carefully to see whether this voluntary code is effective in providing safeguards against the serious harms that arise from the spread of disinformation and misinformation on digital platforms,” the communications minister, Paul Fletcher, said at the time.
The code was recommended by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s digital platforms inquiry in 2019. The ACCC said the industry should either agree on a voluntary code to deal with disinformation or face a mandatory code created by government.
“The ACCC is particularly concerned about the risk of consumers being exposed to serious incidents of disinformation – false or inaccurate information deliberately created to harm a person, social group, organisation or country,” the report said.
The draft code by industry initially focused on disinformation but had since been expanded to also deal with misinformation.
Twitter has taken steps to curb coronavirus misinformation throughout the pandemic.
It developed a Covid-19 misleading information policy and has suspended high-profile users, including the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, for tweets suggesting that the coronavirus was not dangerous for non-obese people and those under 65 and that organisations should not force “non-FDA” approved vaccines or masks on people. The tweets were labelled as “misleading”.
Recent data published by Twitter suggests that globally, since the start of the pandemic, it has challenged 11.7m accounts for Covid-19 content, suspended 1,711, and removed 49,612 pieces of content.
