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Twitter Will Warn You If You 'Like' Misleading Tweets (engadget.com) 175

Posted by BeauHD from the heads-up dept.
Earlier this year, Twitter started flagging disputed and potentially misleading tweets. Now, it's expanding the feature so that you'll also get a warning if you attempt to "like" a disputed tweet. Engadget reports: Tapping the heart button on a post that's been labeled as misleading will trigger a prompt with a "Find out more" button to pop up. App experimental feature researcher Jane Manchun Wong discovered the expanded function earlier this month. The tweets she tested, which were related to the elections, showed a warning that says "Official sources may not have called the race when this was tweeted."

A week after election day, Twitter revealed that it labeled 300,000 tweets as misleading between October 27th and November 11th. Out of all those, 456 were blocked from being retweeted or liked and were hidden behind a warning before they could even be viewed. The company says its efforts have led to a 29 percent decrease in quoted tweets containing misleading information. In other Twitter news, the company said today that it would relaunch its verification process early next year along with brand-new guidelines for users seeking out that small, blue badge.
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Twitter Will Warn You If You 'Like' Misleading Tweets More

Twitter Will Warn You If You 'Like' Misleading Tweets

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  • It's a useless feature and a useless metric, that only serves as a "instant gratification" tool to make people addicted to attention.

    • Until you get millions of Likes and then it's the best thing in the world!

    • The like button is easier to get to than the bookmark, when you want to come back to it later.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kisai ( 213879 )

      Liking a bad tweet, this warning is a "are you sure you want to label yourself as an idiot?" flag, nothing more.

  • Twitter users need this bad! (Score:3)

    by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @08:12PM (#60763184)
    They are steep! After all they are on twitter reading what someone else has done and about how they should think about everything.
    Just to self absorbed to see that real life is better than anything social media has to offer.

  • Positive feedback loops (Score:3, Insightful)

    by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @08:21PM (#60763218)
    Twitter will suppress certain narratives based on the say so of third party organizations it deems trustworthy to adjudicate such things. Those organizations have a vested interest in keeping their positions of authority and thus have incentives to flag as false stories that cast them in a bad light.

    Also at play is the following dynamic: many of these organizations are staffed by younger journalists or people who move between major newspapers and media and fact checkers. And it's a good rule of thumb (as confirmed by @jack himself), that journalists use Twitter as an information source.

    So you have positive feedback reinforcing that in-group's biases by effectively casting it as independently verified truth when it is often a game of telephone. Whether that hurts or helps your guy get into office or stay in office isn't the problem so much as the fact that the public will be half blind while being told it has perfect vision.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      And it's a good rule of thumb (as confirmed by @jack himself), that journalists use Twitter as an information source.

      They might call it that, but I'm pretty sure anything with a SNR of less than one is considered a noise source. :-D

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Entrope ( 68843 )

        Something with an SNR rather close to zero is a noise source. With SNR closer to one, you just need to be able to exploit the signal's structure to recover at least part of the original message. The Shannon-Hartley theorem says that the capacity of a channel, in bits per second, approaches the bandwidth, in Hertz, as the SNR approaches one (from the same direction, either from above or from below).

    • Sounds like a great fiction novel, but totally devoid of reality. Some different platform will take the place for RightwingNutjobs to circulate their garbage.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tflf ( 4410717 )

      So you have positive feedback reinforcing that in-group's biases by effectively casting it as independently verified truth when it is often a game of telephone. Whether that hurts or helps your guy get into office or stay in office isn't the problem so much as the fact that the public will be half blind while being told it has perfect vision.

      I'm seeing "postive feedback reinforcement" from third-party organizations on both sides of the political spectrum. For every left-wing snowflake journalist there is a right wing redneck equivilant. Both extremes are vehemently opposed to any idea, program or opportunity championed by the other, are immune to critical thinking grounded in fact, and have incestous relationships with the organizations they most closely embrace as "independant and truthful" sources of information.
      Both have legions of true bel

    • Re:Positive feedback loops (Score:4, Insightful)

      by PhrostyMcByte ( 589271 ) <phrosty@gmail.com> on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @10:48AM (#60764912) Homepage

      You can say this, but I have yet to see a tweet flagged/censored that I felt Twitter made a mistake on. The only tweets I've seen affected are ones that were some combination of divisive false propaganda or inciting violence/hate.

      Maybe in the future it will be abused. Maybe it will even be like you said: not overt and maybe not on purpose, but purely via systemic unmitigated bias. It seems likely that journalists and other groups will raise big warning flags if this were the case. It is after all pretty easy to detect when a tweet is flagged, and there are plenty of avenues to get the word out that aren't Twitter.

      Normally I am very much anti-censorship, but this is a giant problem and I don't see any other way around it. So long as they clearly define the rules and are consistent in applying them, I think it's better than just doing nothing. Social networks have a very clear and harmful multiplying effect on crackpot stuff. Something has to be done about it, and teaching everyone critical thinking ain't it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      There's a really easy fix for this: just don't allow fact checkers to check stories about themselves.

      It may still not be absolutely perfect but here perfect is very much the enemy of good. When you reject all verification and factual information by instinctively distrusting all sources of information you get the post-truth age, which hopefully we are moving out of now.

  • that might be flagged as misleading - but probably flagged as other things too

  • Just like Reddit (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rubberbando ( 784342 ) on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @08:31PM (#60763246)
    Reddit has been already been doing this for months. They threaten to ban you for upvoting something that they don't approve of but don't tell you what it was that you upvoted. Nothing but mind games and mods abusing their power over there.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Reddit doesn't ban for upvoting posts (Score:5, Informative)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @10:08PM (#60763508)
      They _will_ ban you for raiding a sub-reddit. This includes upvoting shit posts in mass as part of the raid. If you're on a BLM sub reddit and your upvoting a racist joke odds are you just joined into a sub-reddit raid. You should have known better, and if you didn't you do now.

      Now, you *will* get banned like crazy from sub-reddits for posting in other subs.

      What was happening is that a bunch of yahoos from the right wing forums were crap flooding the BLM forums. So much so their mods couldn't keep up. So they just started banning people that post in certain right wing forums. Post to a right wing forum and get banned.

      I've been banned from a few left wing forums because I'll sometimes post in the right wing ones (it's a waste of time, BTW, the mods on the right wing forums are so strict they're echo chambers).

      The right wing forums on reddit have collapsed into a few super well moderated forums because if they're not super well moderated the racists and white supremecists show up and Reddit _will_ ban those (and eventually your entire sub if you don't get them under control). I'm talking the folks who casually use the N* word. A side effect to this is that all the right wingers hang on on 1 or 2 forums and when they go on a raid they can crush just about any sub-reddit they want unless Reddit itself steps in.
  • Best solution is not to play.
  • Does this mean that everything not flagged as 'misleading' is considered accurate? Where do you draw the line in judging something as 'misleading' ?
  • This is how it's going to be interpreted by the people who get these messages anyway. It will reinforce the idea that there's a global cartel of 5G, floridating, round-earth, mercury-based corona vaccine pushers targeting THEM so that people won't hear the REAL truth.

    • Re:Misleading? That's what they want you to think! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Actually, I do RTFA ( 1058596 ) on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @11:43PM (#60763704)

      It's not the people already drinking the Kool-Aid this is for, it's to prevent new people from joining them.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shark ( 78448 )

        In my limited experience, it feels like it's having an opposite Streisand-like effect. I imagine it works if they keep doing it but to abuse your analogy, I know of at least a handful of people who had their first sip specifically because they were told not to and found it rather tasty.

      • Why? Why should Twitter have any role in shaping beliefs? Why should Twitter be the one to arbitrate fact? Why should Twitter take any side in a disagreement between users when people are perfectly capable of arguing with each other without help?

        Who cares if some dumbass wants to believe the world is flat? Twitter doesn't need to step in and point out what the rest of the world already knows. Just let the idiot be an idiot until they build themselves a rocket and find out the hard way.

        • It turns out that idiots voting like idiots hurts me. It turns out idiots with guns shooting people hurts me. It turns out idiots donating all the free cash to cult leaders then forcing me to watch them starve or donate food hurts me. So I care.

        • Why? Why should Twitter have any role in shaping beliefs? Why should Twitter be the one to arbitrate fact? Why should Twitter take any side in a disagreement between users when people are perfectly capable of arguing with each other without help?

          Who cares if some dumbass wants to believe the world is flat? Twitter doesn't need to step in and point out what the rest of the world already knows. Just let the idiot be an idiot until they build themselves a rocket and find out the hard way.

          Yep, we used to call that freedom. Oh well. it was nice while it lasted.

  • "Consider Your Social Credit Score" (Score:3, Informative)

    by Cmdln Daco ( 1183119 ) on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @11:34PM (#60763670)

    How soon before the popup warns:

    "Consider your social credit score before proceeding.

    Are you sure you want to click 'like'?"

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Never. Your Silicon Valley Submission Scale on the other hand will be adjusted on the background, affecting visibility of all your actions to others.

      Seriously, that's one thing that SV corporations have been learning. They don't have the popular backing to go full CCP enforcement. It has to be done slowly, with plausible deniability.

      While the end goal is the same, the methods have to be different to adjust for different cultures in much of the the Western cultures resist thought suppression much harder than

    • How soon before the popup warns:

      "Consider your social credit score before proceeding.

      Are you sure you want to click 'like'?"

      That's pretty much how slashdot works with karma, as a logged in user your posts start with +1, but if if you've earned enough karma you default +2, also the chance of getting modpoints and how many.

  • Because clearly they believe their users are children.

    They wouldn't need stupid "features" like this if they believed their service was being used by functioning adults.

  • Welcome to the world of thought control. Are you sanguine about corporations and consortia of corporations controlling your thoughts but panicked about the government doing this? Doesn't the act make them the de facto government you are afraid of? Which is worse, corporate thought control by Google/Facebook/Twitter or by government thought control? Do you think you have a "none of the above" choice? This is a situation that requires a great deal of careful thought, because "it is possible so there is no way

  • George Orwell says "hi" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @04:43AM (#60764186) Homepage

    Twitter doesn't like someone's opinion? Label it "misleading" - lots of people will believe it, and devalue the tweet.

    Who is Twitter, to steer the beliefs of the masses? Why should we tolerate them exercising subtle-but-real Orwellian power? The same for Facebook, or any other service that enforces "right-think".

    Twitter claims to be a public platform, specifically: "We advocate for free expression and protecting the health of the public conversation around the world." If that's what they claim, then they should be required to live up to it. Free expression != censorship, no matter how subtle.

    • I think part of the problem is that free expression and a "healthy" public conversation are incompatible. Not if you define "healthy" conversation to be polite and respectful, and especially not uncontroversial. Free expression means that people who are angry, arrogant, disgusted, discontented, dismissive, or simply hateful get to express their thoughts, feelings and opinions with the same impunity that polite and agreeable people do.

      Trolls suck, but they have the same right to free expression that som

      • free expression and a "healthy" public conversation are incompatible

        I disagree. People don't have to listen to people whose views they dislike. Essentially all social media platforms have the concept of following or subscribing: you get to choose who you want to hear from. Many also have the opposite - for example, on Reddit you can read the general feed, but suppress subreddits that you find annoying.

        Second, you mention trolls, but trolls can easily be controlled by a decent moderation system. Slashdot is

    • Re:George Orwell says "hi" (Score:4, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @03:02PM (#60765752)

      Who is Twitter, to steer the beliefs of the masses?

      Who is Twitter that you value them a completely public space and decide that you have the right to force a private company to have to appear to support a narrative you don't like?

      Freedom of Speech includes not having to support speech you don't like in your own house. You don't like it, build another house next door.

  • ... have been doing a simple test: tweeting "Biden won {insert state that Trump won}!" Strangely, no flags ...

  • By "misleading" they mean conservative (Score:3, Insightful)

    by walterbyrd ( 182728 ) on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @01:45PM (#60765440)

    Why not just say it? Everybody knows it.

    Right now a complete BS story about Parler being hacked is going around. Twitter is fine with that story.

    But no matter how well verified a story may be, if it does not conform to the leftist agenda, it's automatically "misleading."

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