Twitter admits it went too far with '5G causes COVID-19' fact-check labels
Even Twitter admits it was too heavy-handed with its misinformation labels for posts about COVID-19, especially those about the unproven connection between coronavirus infections and 5G cellular connectivity.
A Twitter Support thread on Friday explained how back in April the platform started highlighting potentially misleading posts around coronavirus and inaccurate causes of the infectious disease. But Twitter's efforts might've gone too far.
"Not all of those Tweets had potentially misleading content associating COVID-19 and 5G," Twitter admitted.
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The fact-checking measure was getting slapped onto stories and tweets that weren't full of misinformation, just merely connected or related to the 5G-corona topic.
So Twitter is promising to improve the automation process for labels and make sure fewer labels are posted on "unrelated" tweets. The thread didn't go into how it'll do that exactly, but, say, an article about telecom workers threatened by 5G-corona believers should no longer get flagged as misinformation. Only articles and tweets that perpetuate unsubstantiated claims should get caught in Twitter's system once it's updated.
By the way, even with the labeling roll-back, 5G still doesn't cause coronavirus.
Topics Health Social Media X/Twitter COVID-19
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
