Via Global News, a Reuters report: It’s not just Trump — Twitter fact-checking thousands of tweets, many about coronavirus. Excerpt:
In addition to disputing misleading claims made by U.S. President Donald Trump about mail-in ballots this week, Twitter has added fact-checking labels to thousands of other tweets since introducing the alerts earlier this month, mostly on posts about the coronavirus.
The company does not expect to need additional staff for the undertaking, Twitter spokeswoman Liz Kelley said on Saturday. Nor is it partnering with independent fact-checking organizations, as Facebook and Google have, to outsource the debunking of viral posts flagged by users.
Social media platforms have been under fierce scrutiny over how they police rapidly spreading false information and other types of abusive content since Russia exploited the networks to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Fact-checking groups said they welcomed Twitter’s new approach, which adds a “get the facts” tag linking to more information, but said they hoped the company would more clearly lay out its methodology and reasoning.
On Friday, Chief Executive Jack Dorsey acknowledged the criticism, saying he agreed fact-checking “should be open source and thus verifiable by everyone.” In a separate tweet, Dorsey said more transparency from the company was “critical.”
The company’s move to label Trump’s claims about mail-in ballots separates it from larger competitors such as Facebook , which declares its neutrality by leaving fact-check decisions to third-party partners and exempts politicians’ posts from review.
“To a degree, fact-checking is subjective. It’s subjective in what you pick to check, and it’s subjective in how you rate something,” said Aaron Sharockman, executive director of U.S. fact-checking site PolitiFact, who said Twitter’s process was opaque.
Twitter telegraphed in May that its new policy of adding fact-checking labels to disputed or misleading coronavirus information would be expanded to other topics.
It said this week — after tagging Trump’s tweets — that it was now labeling misleading content related to election integrity.
Twitter’s Kelley said the team is continuing to expand the effort to include other topics, prioritizing claims that could cause people immediate harm.
