Social media site Twitter recently boasted of curbing the spread of misinformation on its platform by slowing down the spread of all information on its platform, according to a Nov. 13 report in Breitbart. Based on the changes Twitter made to its platform, the total number of retweets, which is the main way to quickly spread ideas among users, dropped by 20 percent.
Bloomberg reports that social media giant Twitter recently announced that it has successfully curbed the spread of misinformation on its platform during the presidential election. It did this by curbing the spread of all information on its platform.
Twitter said this week that it tagged 300,000 user posts from Oct. 27 to Nov. 11 because they violated rules related to election misinformation.Twitter also changed its retweet feature to require users to add their own comments before retweeting a post on the platform.
Twitter said quote tweets designed to encourage users to add more context to posts increased by 26 percent as a result of the prompt, while regular retweets decreased by 23 percent. Quoted tweets and retweets combined decreased by 20 percent.
Twitter proudly stated. “This change has slowed the spread of misinformation and was achieved through an overall reduction in retweets.”
Between Election Day and Friday of this week, Twitter marked about 34 percent of the tweets and retweets sent by President Trump as “controversial.” Breitbart News reported extensively on this, most recently noting that 25 of President Trump’s Twitter and Facebook posts in a 24-hour period were labeled or labeled as controversial.
Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s director of legal and policy, wrote in a blog post, “These enforcement actions remain part of our ongoing strategy to increase context and limit the spread of misleading information about election processes around the world on Twitter.”
It may not have occurred to Twitter, however, that the 20 percent reduction in retweets may simply be because users have moved on to its competitor, Parler. At the time of writing, Parler is the second most downloaded free app in the Apple App Store, and its slogan is “social media with integrity”. Perhaps this is a sign that Twitter will see more retweet drops in the near future.
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