Twitter working on new feature to flag fake news
01 Jul 2017
Twitter is working on a new feature that will allow users to flag tweets that they thought contained false or misleading information.
According to The Washington Post, the feature was still under testing at the prototype phase and when released, it could be a tab in a drop-down menu alongside tweets.
The tool is an attempt to combat abuse and factually inaccurate tweets that might originate from accounts run by bots, extremists that use Twitter to recruit, and even racist and misogynistic trolls.
According to a report by the University of Oxford, during the recent US election, automated Twitter accounts had helped create an illusion of popularity by political candidates.
According to a Pew Research Center study, about two in three US adults (64 per cent) said fabricated news stories had caused them "a great deal of confusion" about basic facts concerning current issues and events.
According to the survey of 1,002 US adults, 23 per cent of respondents said they had shared a fake new story.
To make matters worse, in 2014, Twitter said that 23 million of its users tweeted automatically without human input - via bots.
According to The Washington Post report, the sources requested not to be named as they were not allowed to speak about it.
