Twitter To Recruit Tattle Tale Army To Fight COVID ‘Misinformation’

Twitter is rolling out a new feature that will allow its more censorious users to report tweets for alleged “misinformation” regarding coronavirus, according to a report in the Verge.

Twitter currently restricts its user-led reporting system to spam, abusive and “harmful” content, “misleading” content, and tweets that express suicidal intent.

It’s unclear why Twitter would roll out a new category when it already has an option to report  “misleading” content, but one possible reason is the intense public pressure that the Biden administration has put on social media platforms to tackle so-called COVID misinformation.

Via the Verge:

Starting today, users will be able to report misinformation through the same process as harassment or other harmful content, through the dropdown menu at the top right of every tweet. Users will be prompted to select whether the misleading comment is political, health-related, or falls into another category. The politics category includes more specific forms of misinformation like content related to elections. The health category will also include an option for users to flag COVID-19-specific misinformation.

The new feature will be available on Tuesday for most users in the US, Australia, and South Korea. Twitter said it expects to run this experiment for a few months before deciding to roll it out to additional markets.

Twitter said that not every report will be reviewed as the platform continues to test the feature. But the data obtained through the test will help the company determine how it could expand on the feature over the next few weeks. The test could be used to identify tweets containing misinformation that have the potential to go viral as well.

Because not every report will be reviewed, this suggests that some of the reporting data will automatically feed Twitter’s algorithms, lowering users’ hidden scores and potentially banning them from the platform without any human oversight.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.