Twitter to label fake media content

Dubai - Tweets containing synthetic and manipulated media that are likely to cause harm will be labelled.

From March 5 onwards, twitter will label fake and manipulated media content including videos and pictures, said George Salama, the micro-blogging site's head of public policy and government relations, Mena.
The announcement was made during a workshop titled 'Digital Awareness and Healthy Conversations through Twitter', that was held at the Dubai Press Club's headquarters on the occasion of Safer Internet Day.
Tweets containing synthetic and manipulated media that are likely to cause harm will be labelled, with people being shown a warning before retweeting or liking a tweet. Twitter will also reduce the visibility of those tweets, in addition to providing additional clarifications and context as available.
Participants at the workshop were given an overview of Twitter and its purpose to serve the public conversation, as well as its latest audience numbers that have increased to 152 million daily active users. The session, which discussed the role of Twitter as a real time information network, also discussed best practices around Twitter's safety tools.
Salama provided insights into Twitter's work to help people find credible information and feel safe while participating in conversations on the platform. He said as part of its efforts to make the platform more transparent, a total of 97 million accounts have been challenged in the first six months of 2018. Tweets that targeting someone's religion is also counted as violation of the public policy and such accounts are taken down.
He also touched on Twitter's investments in proactive technology, which continues to reduce the burden on people to report on Twitter by surfacing more content for review in accordance with Twitter's rules and policies.
"Over the past 12 months, Twitter has taken many steps to build a healthier platform. Rules were updated to make them easier to understand, and a new function that enables people to hide replies to their conversations was introduced," he added.
Responding to questions, Kinda Ibrahim, director of media partnerships, clarified that Twitter has no plans in the near future to add 'editing' option for the tweets sent.
Safer Internet Day
To mark the occasion, Twitter launched a series of Arabic how-to videos from the official @TwitterMENA account aimed at improving and enriching people's experience on the platform. The videos highlighted a number of features, such as muting topics, accounts and conversations; blocking accounts; reporting accounts that break the rules; and filtering notifications. Twitter also launched a custom emoji triggered by hashtags #SID2020 and #SaferInternetDay in English.
reporters@khaleejtimes.com