Twitter Battles Vaccine Propaganda With New Search Feature
If you look up for tweets associated to vaccines as of this week, the first thing you view on Twitter is a post from the US Department of Health and Human Services asking you to dependent source of health data rather than spreading anti-vax misinformation.
Previous week, Twitter declared that it might be rolling out a new tool in search that might ask consumers to go to vaccines.org, which is operated by executives at HHS. Over the last handful of months, social media firms such as Twitter and Facebook have encountered intense heat from the public and lawmakers to ban anti-vaccination misinformation from their services.
“We are committed to defending the health of the people conversation on our platform,” the blog post claimed. “Making sure that people can find data from authentic sources is a major part of that voyage.”
The tool appears on iOS, Android, and mobile site of Twitter, and on the newly developed desktop website in Canada, the US, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Korea for time being.
Twitter has employed a same feature that prompts consumers who look for terms associated to suicide to get in touch with a hotline for assistance. As per the blog post, Twitter aims to expand this tool to other health-associated search terms in the future.
On a related note, Twitter claims that it fixed an error that led to inadvertently share and collect some consumers’ location info. It impacted some users who were signed in to more than single account on its iOS application. If you had the exact location function turned-on on one account, Twitter might have gathered location info when you were employing a different account on which you did not have that function turned on. Workers found the bug, Twitter claimed to the media, and it claimed it will inform consumers whenever there is an issue.