Twitter to label posts with vaccine misinformation

Twitter announced Monday that it will begin labeling posts that contain misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.

The labels will alert users that health officials consider vaccines for the novel coronavirus to be safe for most people.

They may also contain links to content from trusted sources on vaccines.

Twitter is also implementing a strike system for its broader policy on coronavirus vaccine misinformation, where more than one violation will lead to accounts being locked and five or more will trigger permanent suspensions.

“We believe the strike system will help to educate the public on our policies and further reduce the spread of potentially harmful and misleading information on Twitter, particularly for repeated moderate and high-severity violations of our rules,” the company said in a blog post Monday.

Labels will first be applied by humans, but Twitter is aiming to have automated systems do the same task.

The platform already has rules around more general coronavirus misinformation.

Twitter said in Monday’s blog post that it has “removed more than 8,400 tweets and challenged 11.5 million accounts worldwide” under those rules.