Twitter examines fake news

san francisco - Twitter is investigating whether it can add a feature that allows users to mark tweets containing misleading news, fake news or harmful information. That reports The Washington Post based on two sources.

The function is still in the test phase and may never be released. If it's rolled out, Twitter hopes to be fooled against abuse of its platform. The function might look like a small tab that appears in the dropdown menu next to tweets.

How the new functionality works precisely is still unclear. The company is still working on designing it. The process is partly slow because of the fear that people could abuse the new function.

Machine learning

Twitter also focuses on machine learning, a method in which software tries to detect data from accounts to determine if they are fake. For example, if an account shares consistent political messages in English, while its IP address is always in Russia, that could be noted.

Twitter is being plagued by many issues, including fake accounts spreading automated fake news. Extremists use the service as a way to recruit people. There are also so-called trolls on the platform that threaten, for example, women and minorities.

New urgency

Following the presidential elections in the United States, these issues were given new urgency. Researchers and critics argued that social media had a bad influence on the debate about those elections.

Two out of three adult Americans in a poll of Pew Research Center in December said that news articles distributed through social media caused confusion about facts and public events. According to Twitter Audit estimation, 59 percent of Trump's followers consist of bots or fake accounts, while 66 percent of followers of his opponent Hillary Clinton would be out of control.