The Washington Post claims Twitter is prototyping a feature that would allow users to report “fake news” and “harmful information.”
“The feature, which is still in a prototype phase and may never be released, is part of the company’s uphill battle against rampant abuse on its platform,” reported the Washington Post on Thursday. “It could look like a tiny tab appearing in a drop-down menu alongside tweets, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release details of the effort.”
Despite the report, a Twitter spokesman claimed, “There are no current plans to launch any type of product along these lines.”
According to the Washington Post, the spokesman “pointed to a company blog post from earlier this month which said that Twitter was adding personnel and resources, and building new tools, but shared few details about the effort.”
In March, top executives from Twitter, Facebook, and Google appeared in front of the UK Home Affairs Select Committee, where they were criticized for failing to remove “hate speech.”
In the same month, popular pro-Trump comedy account and Breitbart News contributor “PizzaPartyBen” was permanently suspended from the platform without warning or an explanation for the ban.
It was discovered in March that the Drudge Report was being hidden behind a “sensitive content” filter, while Twitter searches for “racist” and “Hitler” started to return President Trump’s profile.
In May, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams criticized the concept of free speech.
“I think the internet is broken,” claimed Williams. “And it’s a lot more obvious to a lot of people that it’s broken.”
“I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place… I was wrong about that,” he continued.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook.