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Twitter deploys human monitors to strike down coronavirus vaccine misinformation

WION Web Team
New Delhi, Delhi, IndiaUpdated: Mar 02, 2021, 03:07 PM IST
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Photograph:(AFP)

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The microblogging platform will label tweets that include misleading information about coronavirus vaccines.

Many people opposed to vaccination, or anti-vaxxers, find their audience in social media, but now Twitter is deploying human monitors to crack down on disinformation as Covid-19 shots are being rolled out across the world.

The microblogging platform will label tweets that include misleading information about coronavirus vaccines.

Twitter said it has started using human reviewers to assess whether tweets violate its policy against COVID vaccine misinformation. Eventually, the work will be done by a combination of humans and automation, it said.

It will be using a "strike system" to eventually remove accounts that repeatedly violate its rules.

"Through the use of the strike system, we hope to educate people on why certain content breaks our rules so they have the opportunity to further consider their behaviour and their impact on the public conversation," Twitter said in a blog post on Monday.

"We believe the strike system will help to educate the public on our policies and further reduce the spread of potentially harmful and misleading information on Twitter, particularly for repeated moderate and high-severity violations of our rules," the company said.

Twitter had already banned some COVID-related misinformation in December, including falsehoods about how the virus spreads, whether masks are effective and the risk of infection and death.

People with one violation or strike will see no action. Two strikes will lead to an account being locked for 12 hours. Five or more will get a user permanently banned from Twitter, but users can appeal against the removal.

There is still a great amount of vaccine scepticism in various countries. In Ukraine, for instance, medical facilities reportedly threw out some unused coronavirus vaccines after doctors didn't show up for their inoculation appointments. 

(With agency inputs)