As Twitchy reported, Twitter said it’s introducing some “friction” into the retweeting process to help slow the spread of disinformation on the platform. When users click the Retweet button, a quote tweet box pops up, giving them a moment’s pause to decide if they really want to retweet that story or add some important context. Curiously, this was implemented after the New York Times editorial board suggested social media platforms like Twitter “introduce friction into the algorithms” to keep fake news, like an election night Trump victory, from spreading.
Today, you might have noticed even more friction from Twitter; sometimes, when retweeting, you’ll see a message reading, “Want to read the article first?” and then another warning, “Headlines don’t tell the full story.” They really want to discourage people from retweeting.
This should disturb every American.@Twitter has placed a headline warning label on this @WSJ article about the inspiring @kimKBaltimore.
The headline?
“A Black Lives Matter Republican”.
Twitter is censoring black women for not being Democrats.
Fix. This. Now. https://t.co/yZSWbOPvgi pic.twitter.com/bxtm0BARMA
— David Steinberg (@realDSteinberg) October 21, 2020
So if headlines don’t tell the whole story, how is the Washington Post getting away with this tweet:
Weird. Twitter did not do the “headlines don’t tell the full story” thing on this one, even though the WaPo headline here is truly misleading.
The volunteer received the placebo. pic.twitter.com/PPz9tgE4Np
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) October 21, 2020
The volunteer was in the control group and did not take the vaccine.
Not including that in the tweet is reckless clickbait and the Washington Post knows this and has left it up anyway. https://t.co/6g3kASTf6P
— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) October 21, 2020
Honestly don't understand Twitter's rules. if they are going to police tweets for dangerous misinformation, how can they possibly allow WaPo to leave this tweet up? https://t.co/thJCA6oo8q
— (((AG))) (@AGHamilton29) October 21, 2020
The volunteer was in the control group. They did not receive the vaccine. The headline gives the impression that their death was related to being part of the trial, which thus dangerous undermines faith in the vaccine.
— (((AG))) (@AGHamilton29) October 21, 2020
As I keep saying – Twitter giving things official misinformation labels grants de-facto authentication to anything that *doesn't* have that label, so unless their system is always working at 100% efficiency, it's actively spreading misinformation just by existing. https://t.co/5NrHKFAN2Y
— Noam Blum (@neontaster) October 21, 2020
Literally the most irresponsible way you could possibly cover this story @washingtonpost pic.twitter.com/Tbo72TkAu1
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) October 21, 2020
Yep.
Related:
Twitter ‘introducing some friction into the process’ of retweeting until ‘at least’ the end of election week https://t.co/SgLwk0VB0Q
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) October 20, 2020
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