It’s been a really rocky start for Twitter this year. The app has acquired a new leadership and we’re not quite sure if that has worked out too well in its favor.
Elon Musk’s major plans to rewrite the platform’s verification rules were seen as a way to combat the growing number of misleading profiles on the app. So many accounts failed to achieve authentic verification and impersonation was running at an all-time high on the platform as well.
For a mere value of $8, we saw so many accounts get the verified badge on the app and there was no end to the dilemmas this brought along with it. Musk and his team’s executives knew something had to be done quickly and that’s why they set forth to pause the subscription and introduce another plan.
A relaunch was done and more measures were taken to try and reduce this impersonation factor before it was too late. Musk included color-coded checks and more to help users differentiate business profiles from the usual. More authentication checks were similarly introduced and Twitter really had its fingers crossed with the new Blue Subscription launch.
But now, we’re seeing a huge problem. This is actually super worrying and it’s related to those paying the $8 fee. Either they are doing this wilfully or inadvertently. The goal seems to be related to making disinformation a huge part of the app as the profiles are filled with nothing but that.
The news comes to us thanks to a new study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s Quant Lab. This delineated how there’s so much misconception about vaccines and climate change thanks to tweets from the app’s Blue Subscribers.
Many assume they’re verified accounts and hence go on believing them like no other. And it’s awfully concerning to some people as to where this is going and which direction we may be heading toward.
You may have thought the new Blue subscriptions were worth trusting but it has in fact done the opposite. It’s causing lies and disinformation to spread even faster on this platform.
The research is highlighting nearly 60,000 tweets as a whole and they entail words such as Ukraine, vaccine, and even climate. They’re being shared left and right by users on Twitter Blue. Despite being dubbed as legacy verified individuals, they have paid for Blue ticks but are yet to pay for the likes of verification.
And there are nearly 60K tweets put up by the Twitter Blue platform’s users that have such terms and they’re hot buttons for disinformation. What’s even more alarming is how so many of these tweets entailed three keywords that had been analyzed. They had a startling 930,000 likes, comments, and more in total. And when fact-checking was performed, it was sad to see how they failed to be trusted across the board.
The study says that more than one in four of such tweets failed to entail details that were against the truth. And it’s just a huge eye-opener to us all about what’s going on.
H/T: FastCo
Read next: Twitter Is Revamping Its Suicide Prevention Feature And Security Hotlines
Elon Musk’s major plans to rewrite the platform’s verification rules were seen as a way to combat the growing number of misleading profiles on the app. So many accounts failed to achieve authentic verification and impersonation was running at an all-time high on the platform as well.
For a mere value of $8, we saw so many accounts get the verified badge on the app and there was no end to the dilemmas this brought along with it. Musk and his team’s executives knew something had to be done quickly and that’s why they set forth to pause the subscription and introduce another plan.
A relaunch was done and more measures were taken to try and reduce this impersonation factor before it was too late. Musk included color-coded checks and more to help users differentiate business profiles from the usual. More authentication checks were similarly introduced and Twitter really had its fingers crossed with the new Blue Subscription launch.
But now, we’re seeing a huge problem. This is actually super worrying and it’s related to those paying the $8 fee. Either they are doing this wilfully or inadvertently. The goal seems to be related to making disinformation a huge part of the app as the profiles are filled with nothing but that.
The news comes to us thanks to a new study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s Quant Lab. This delineated how there’s so much misconception about vaccines and climate change thanks to tweets from the app’s Blue Subscribers.
Many assume they’re verified accounts and hence go on believing them like no other. And it’s awfully concerning to some people as to where this is going and which direction we may be heading toward.
You may have thought the new Blue subscriptions were worth trusting but it has in fact done the opposite. It’s causing lies and disinformation to spread even faster on this platform.
The research is highlighting nearly 60,000 tweets as a whole and they entail words such as Ukraine, vaccine, and even climate. They’re being shared left and right by users on Twitter Blue. Despite being dubbed as legacy verified individuals, they have paid for Blue ticks but are yet to pay for the likes of verification.
And there are nearly 60K tweets put up by the Twitter Blue platform’s users that have such terms and they’re hot buttons for disinformation. What’s even more alarming is how so many of these tweets entailed three keywords that had been analyzed. They had a startling 930,000 likes, comments, and more in total. And when fact-checking was performed, it was sad to see how they failed to be trusted across the board.
The study says that more than one in four of such tweets failed to entail details that were against the truth. And it’s just a huge eye-opener to us all about what’s going on.
H/T: FastCo
Read next: Twitter Is Revamping Its Suicide Prevention Feature And Security Hotlines
