Twitter strike system will ban users who post COVID vaccine misinformation

In the ongoing battle to rid social media platforms of misinformation, Twitter will now give you only five chances to stop spreading lies on the internet.

Social media platform Twitter will introduce a new “five strike” system to combat misinformation, with a particular focus on COVID-19 vaccinations.

In December, Twitter said “during the coming weeks” it would “begin to label tweets that contain potentially misleading information about the vaccines”.

While technically correct, that statement itself was potentially misleading and “coming months” would have been more accurate, but the company announced on Monday it would now start adding those labels.

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Twitter will soon add labels to potentially misleading tweets.

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It has also introduced a new strike system designed to flag misleading information while also informing users why they’re having their tweets labelled as misinformation.

The first strike is more of a warning and doesn’t carry a ban, but the second and third strikes will result in your account being locked for 12 hours each time.

A fourth strike will result in a one week ban while a fifth infraction means your account will be permanently banned.

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The company will also institute a ‘strike’ system.

Twitter is trying to grow its userbase but will ban those who repeatedly share misinformation. Picture: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP

Twitter employees are flagging the tweets at first, which will then be used to try and train algorithms to do it by itself, similar to Facebook’s (less than flawless) approach to policing misinformation on its platforms.

Because training machine learning can take time, Twitter “will begin with English-language content first and use this same process as we work to expand to other languages and cultural contexts over time”.

Twitter said it’s “removed more than 8400 tweets and challenged 11.5 million accounts worldwide” since December.

The company is also linking to official public health authorities for information on the virus and pandemic, which it started doing even before the pandemic was officially declared last year.