Twitter to apply labels to misleading vaccine information

Twitter said Monday that it would start applying labels to tweets that contained misleading information about Covid-19 vaccines and would enforce its coronavirus misinformation policies with a new five-tier “strike” system.

Tweets that violate the policy will get labels with links to official public health information or the Twitter Rules, the company said in a blog post. Twitter said these labels would increase its ability to deploy automated tools to identify and label similar content across the platform. The company’s goal is to eventually use both automated and human review to address Covid-19 misinformation, the post said, but it added that it would take time for the system to be effective.

Twitter will notify people when it applies a label to one of their tweets, and repeated violations of the Covid-19 policy will result in stricter enforcement, the company said. Two or three strikes result in a 12-hour account lock, while four strikes is a seven-day account lock. After five strikes, Twitter said, the company will permanently suspend the account. (Twitter allows users to submit appeals if accounts are locked or suspended in error.)

The company said it was making these changes to encourage healthy conversation on the platform and help people find reliable information. Since introducing its Covid-19 guidance in March 2020, Twitter said, it had removed more than 8,400 tweets and notified 11.5 million accounts of possible violations worldwide.