Twitter apparently is working on a feature that will make it easier for users to flag fake news or offensive content. However, those familiar with the company’s plans have stated that the feature may never actually launch. It’s currently being tested internally, which means it could be launched imminently, or it could never see the light of day. The feature could appear as an option in the drop down arrow that appears on every tweet, which would be similar to how Facebook allows users to flag fake news on its platform as well.
Fake news became a pretty popular subject over the past year, largely due to the now-President, Donald Trump. While running for office he claimed that many media outlets were fake news, and he has continued stating that throughout his presidency. Now while his definition for fake news isn’t really the real definition, fake news is a pretty big deal. There are plenty of news outlets out there that do publish fake news, articles that don’t have any sources, or any accurate sources. Therefore it is spreading fake news, which is also pretty dangerous, in fact that’s how Russia impacted the election in the US, at least according to a number of intelligence agencies in the US including the CIA.
This fake news filter that Twitter is working on could also expand to followers that are bots. There are a large number of bots on Twitter right now, whether these are bots that do actually use the site, or just those that follow people to make their follower counts look larger than they actually are. It’s a pretty big issue on Twitter, especially since a number of these bots do also spread spam all around the website. So that’s another issue that Twitter is going to need to take a deep look at, and it could force the platform to actually launch this feature in the near future. Twitter’s fake news feature could be available in the next few weeks, months or never. It all depends on how the internal testing of this feature plays out for Twitter.