The liberal media has seemingly placed a heavy emphasis on what it considers to be disinformation and misinformation, and Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey had responded.
Dorsey testified to this phenomenon in an interview with Showtime hosts Desus Nice and The Kid Mero on April 22, 2020. “Misleading information is like the challenge of our industry right now,” he told the two on the stream, which was a live event hosted by Twitter. Desus and Mero asked him about what Twitter was going to do when President Donald Trump tweeted “potentially harmful” content about COVID-19. Dorsey replied, “[L]abeling would come in really handy.”
Mero asked, “Maybe ban Trump for like a month, or something like that?” Dorsey’s answer detailed labeling a tweet, a new policy that has been rolled out to deal with tweets from political leaders.
He elaborated, saying that Twitter would provide interstitials, or filters, for the sake of the public interest. One of the reasons for that was because “When it’s broadcast on television, you have no ability to talk back.” But on Twitter, users can disagree, which according to Dorsey, was important.
“Anything that we can do to interstitial a lot of this and provide context that is credible and might show a disagreement or a debate around the topic, I think, would be helpful,” he said.
Labeling would also be used on other accounts and tweets, not just those belonging to world leaders, Dorsey mentioned earlier in the interview. “The team is working on a great experiment to do just that that we hope to launch as quickly as possible to give people a broader context for any particular tweet,” he said. “… I think we’ll disarm a bunch of it.”
Dorsey stressed that Twitter’s number one priority was dealing with misinformation and disinformation. “The ability to create deep fakes is moving much faster and with much higher quality than the ability to detect it. So this is going to be a race, just like security is. You can never build a perfect system. You just have to be 10 steps ahead of the attackers,” he told Desus and Mero.
Twitter recently announced a new policy change to address “Unverified claims that incite people to action,” including claims or tweets that could lead to “panic” or “large-scale disorder.”