The 2016 US presidential election was probably the darkest and lowest moment in the spread of the online disinformation, so much so that social networks have felt the need to design methods to prevent similar episodes from happening again with the 2020 presidential elections.
It is in this vein that the latest idea of Twitter, which NBC News discovered from a demo leaked by the company. Twitter plans to experiment with a labeling system, probably as early as March politically "dangerously misleading" tweets.
It would involve only one of several systems that the microblogging platform intends to experiment in the immediate future: "We are exploring a series of ways to tackle disinformation and make more context available for tweets on Twitter. Disinformation is a critical problem and we will test various ways to deal with it, "Twitter told NBC News. We also recall that Twitter recently banned the spread of deepfakes always in an attempt to battle disinformation.
The modalities are not entirely clear: it seems that users can earn points and gain the right to receive a sort of "community badge" in order to provide the right context to misleading tweets. Users are asked to indicate whether "probable" or "unlikely" that a particular tweet is "dangerously misleading". Twitter then asks the user to indicate, according to him, what percentage of users would respond the same thing on a scale from 1 to 100 and to provide an explanation. It is not clear how the user can collect the points and earn the "community badge".
In the circulated images we see, for example, a tweet by Bernie Sanders in which he declares that 40% of the firearms in the USA are sold without the necessary controls. The tweet is indicated in orange as "dangerously misleading" and below the label you can see the members who have earned the community badge, a small green shield, providing more information to contextualize the declaration. And in this specific case, Sanders' position was based on a 1997 study, where a more recent study indicates that the proportion dropped to 22%.
Will it be the right way? If on the one hand crowdsourced information has its problems, on the other hand it must be considered that on Twitter there is an active participation of users, journalists and fact-checking agencies that fight the spread of tendentious, polarizing information. and misleading especially by politicians. Maybe it is a system that will need some small adjustment while traveling, but it seems to be an encouraging first step in battling a dangerous scourge of this historical era.