As of March last year, Twitter removed nearly 38,000 posts and reported 11.5 million accounts which, in different ways and with different objectives, have poisoned conversations about the coronavirus.
Maybe sharing misleading information, junk content, hypotheses without any basis, making real psychological terrorism with the tools of the worst conspiracy. High or low numbers? It would seem few, but “It is important to place them in the context of the broader and continuing efforts we are pursuing to address the harmful spread of disinformation during the pandemic”, is the response of Ronan costello, senior manager on Twitter’s Public Policy team for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
So, “in addition to prioritizing the removal of content when it presents a clear incitement to action that could cause real harm in the real world, and alerting accounts intoxicating discussions with spam or manipulative content, we also label tweets that contain potentially misleading information on Covid vaccines – added the top manager in the exclusive interview granted to Italian Tech – We are also taking ever more incisive action towards those who repeatedly transgress this policy “.
It alludes to the philosophy known as the Strike System: “However, these actions are just one aspect of our approach. They go hand in hand with the work we are doing through partnerships with governments, which will continue as vaccination campaigns continue around the world. “
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The numbers of a year and a half of pandemic in Italy
The work is obviously monumental: between January 1st 2020 and May 1st 2021, over 17 million and 200 thousand tweets were shared in Italy alone concerning the pandemic, published by a total of over 350,000 unique authors. The conversation peaked on two symbolic dates:
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on 7 March 2020, when, from first outbreak of the Lodigiano the red zone was about to be extended to the whole of Lombardy and to 11 other provinces;
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the following May 4th, first day of reopening of Phase 2 after the hard lockdown that characterized the first wave.
Those were the days of the hashtag #iorestoacasa: the months have passed and with them the hottest fronts of disinformation have evolved. First the origins of the virus, on which the White House has also asked for further information, then vaccines, then in the testing phase and now in full administration mass, scientific studies on every aspect of the epidemic, therapies and more or less bizarre remedies.
A work in constant evolution
Twitter has done it all: labels, enriching the context, reducing the circulation of toxic content and removing posts. But is it enough to clean up fake news from conversations? “We are firmly convinced that we are making good progress on this front – Costello told us – However it is a work in constant evolution as new challenges emerge. In addition to taking direct action through reporting, we are working closely with trusted partners, including public health authorities and governments, to provide insights and insights into understanding often complex issues. “As for Italy,” we have collaborated with the Ministry of Health: when an account searches for information relating to the coronavirus, including vaccines, it immediately intercepts credible and authoritative content at the top of the list. These functions allow those in Italy to visit two different pages of the ministry website according to different needs: one with general information on the disease, the other with information on anti-Covid vaccines “.
Then there are the Twitter Events pages which in 30 countries around the world collect authoritative sources and the free advertisements granted to NGOs such as the Red Cross. Worldwide Twitter has rolled out in a year and a half 183 Ads for Good grants, which are in fact free advertising credits to non-profit organizations: “We believe that this approach that combines various activities has definitely contributed to protecting the public conversation throughout the pandemic,” Costello told us again. Law degree from Trinity College London and specializing in Media and Communication Management at the London School of Economics.
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What’s missing: information on moderators and badges for experts
Yet Twitter, like so many digital and technology giants, struggles to share all the data and Costello doesn’t answer to a question about how many people specifically deal with the coronavirus, supporting automated systems (also happens on TIkTok): we therefore don’t know if there are dedicated teams of moderators, what preparation and what rules they have. Just as we have no information on how many verification badges (the famous blue check of which the assignment program has recently resumed) the social network has assigned doctors, experts and scientists since March 2020, when it exceptionally reopened the process precisely to identify, in the midst of the storm of a mysterious pandemic, the most authoritative sources of information.
What is the Strike System and how does it work
But perhaps the most interesting fruit of this year and a half of pandemic crisis (e infodemic, as the World Health Organization explained from the start) is the aforementioned Strike System: it is a process of progressive penalization of accounts that are guilty of violations of the rules of use of the platform. Costello explained to us that “we are convinced that the Strike system will help educate the public about our policies and further reduce the dissemination of potentially harmful and misleading information on Twitter, particularly for repeated moderate and high-severity violations of our rules. system determines when further action is needed to limit the activity of those who transgress the policy “. How does the punishment mechanism work? “People are notified when their tweets are tagged or removed and this translates into further and progressive measures that temporarily limit the activity on the platform in a first phase – is the answer – Repeated violations of the coronavirus policy determine specific measures based also on the number of Strikes that an account has accumulated “.
According to what has been explained, the violations are articulated as follows:
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a Strike does not include any account-level action;
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two o 3 Strikes result in account blocking for 12 hours;
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4 7-day strikes;
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5 or more Strikes cause permanent suspension da Twitter.
A global policy for different markets
All these operations cannot disregard the laws of the individual countries in which Twitter operates: not everywhere and not in the same way can we intervene in the same way. Twitter is still a US platform: “We are a global company with global policies – is Costello’s reply – Our policy development process involves input and feedback from several internal teams together with our Trust and Safety Council. Which in turn includes various European partners, including European Schoolnet, Insafe, Internet Sans Frontières and Mental Health Europe. It is essential to make sure that we are considering all perspectives from around the world, bearing in mind how different social and cultural contexts can affect how the rules are applied. In addition, we are increasingly asking the public to contribute to our policies, because we want to strive to be even more inclusive in this process. Creating or modifying policies involves analyzing online behavior, developing a clear external language that sets expectations about what is allowed, as well as defining a guide to enforce policies on millions of tweets. “
And therefore, a year and a half after the start of the pandemic, the path really seems still at the beginning.
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