Twitter has introduced its “manipulated media” tag on its platform for the first time to let their users know that a video or photo has been manipulated, shared deceptively or likely to cause serious harm.
Social media platforms have long been criticized for allowing misinformation to spread on their sites, and this is Twitter’s latest attempt to solve this longstanding problem.
According to the site’s new policy on “synthetic and manipulated media”, content is likely to be either labelled or removed depending on which part of the policy the media infringes. According to Twitter, three factors are used to determine if media infringes on this policy. Those are –
– Is the content synthetic or manipulated?
– Is the content shared in a deceptive manner?
– Is the content likely to impact public safety or cause serious harm?
Such factors will include media such as deepfakes, photoshopped images, special effects “CGI” videos that have been shared in a deceptive manner and videos that have been deceptively clipped or altered to remove context.
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Twitter has said that media that infringes on the third factor regarding public safety will likely be removed while other infringements may be labelled with a link that – when clicked – will provide context or other relevant information.
Twitter’s new policy, announced on March 5th 2020, has already been thrown straight into the spotlight since the first high profile case of media being tagged in this way has landed the new policy straight into the middle of the already hotly contested 2020 US Presidential election.
On March 8th 2020, White House director of social media Dan Scavino uploaded a video of Democratic presidential hopeful and former Vice-President Joe Biden apparently endorsing President Trump, saying during a speech “We can only re-elect Donald Trump“. However the video had been clipped to remove context; Biden had really said “We can only re-elect Donald Trump if in fact we get engaged in this circular firing squad here. It’s got to be a positive campaign.”
The video of Biden on Twitter now has a label showing it has been “manipulated”.
Twitter’s argument here is likely to be that since Scavino (and later the President himself) shared the clipped media with the implication that Biden had endorsed the President, the content had been shared in a deceptive manner.
Given the continued rise of misinformation on platforms like Twitter, it is likely that we will be seeing much more of the “manipulated media” tag on content on the social media platform. And its effect on current events like the coronavirus outbreak (which has seen plenty of misinformation about it spreading on social media) and the US presidential election remains to be seen.
NOTE: Many Twitter users will not be able to see the “manipulated media” tag at the time of writing. Twitter has said they are working to solve this glitch.