Twitter says it’s adding special labels to tweets from some U.S. political candidates ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
Twitter says the move is to provide users with “authentic information” and prevent spoofed and fake accounts from fooling users. The labels will include what office a person is running for and where. The labels will appear on retweets as well as tweets off of Twitter, such as when they are embedded in a news story.
Representational image. Pixabay
Twitter, along with Facebook and other social media companies, has been under heavy scrutiny for allowing their platforms to be misused by malicious actors trying to influence elections around the world.
While Twitterati are waiting for an “edit” feature, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has said the micro-blogging platform is considering a “clarify” feature for its over 330 million users.
At a Goldman Sachs event in San Francisco on Thursday, Dorsey said he is considering a “clarify” feature that would allow users to add additional context to a tweet without changing the original content, 9to5Mac.com reported.
“One of the concepts we’re thinking about is clarifications… Kind of like retweet with comment… to add some context and some colour on what they might have tweeted, or what they might have meant,” Dorsey told the audience.
“By doing so you might imagine that the original tweet then would not have the sort of engagement around it. Like you wouldn’t be able to retweet the original tweet, for instance,” he added.
Earlier this month, Dorsey said Twitter is considering the possibility of adding support for editing tweets, but the original version of the tweet would still be viewable.
The Twitter logo appears on a phone post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.. VOA
“Maybe we can introduce a 5-30 seconds delay in the sending of a tweet and within that window, you can edit because the issue with going longer than that is it takes that real-time nature of the conversational flow out of it,” 9To5Mac quoted Dorsey as saying in a podcast interview.
Dorsey first addressed the possibility of adding an edit feature for tweets in December 2016, based on the Twitteratis’ suggestions.
Back in 2018, while visiting India for Twitter’s pre-election campaign, Dorsey was quizzed why Twitter does not have an edit button.
To which, he said, “the reason Twitter does not have an ‘edit’ button is because people may change their opinions by editing the original tweet and then people who don’t agree with the original view, may have already retweeted the tweet, which is not an accurate representation of what they believe.” (IANS)
