Twitter new crisis misinformation policy targets international armed conflict

Ikigai Law
2 min readMay 31, 2022

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Twitter is implementing a new policy which looks to curb the spread of #misinformation on the platform during a crisis. So far it only applies to armed international conflicts as the war in #Ukraine rages. But it could expand these rules to other humanitarian crises.

In light of the ongoing war in Ukraine, Twitter is implementing a crisis misinformation policy to curb the spread of false and harmful narratives in situations of armed conflict, public health emergencies, and large-scale natural disasters. Twitter says that this approach is aimed to slow the spread of the most visible misleading content that could lead to severe harm to people. Twitter will now add notices to Tweets from high profile accounts like state-affiliated media accounts, verified, official government accounts. Users will be allowed to view the tweets, but they will be required to read the warning from the company before proceeding and content that is deemed harmful will not be amplified or recommended. In addition, Twitter says that it will also disable likes, shares and retweets for problematic content. “We’ve found that not amplifying or recommending certain content, adding context through labels, and in severe cases, disabling engagement with the Tweets, are effective ways to mitigate harm, while still preserving speech and records of critical global events,” a blog post from the company said. The social media company will be relying on multiple verifications to assess content that is flagged with the on-ground situation from public sources, conflict monitoring groups, humanitarian organisations, trusted journalists and open-source investigators.

So far, the policy’s lens is trained only on armed international conflicts and it gives examples of problematic content. So false coverage of the situation on the ground will be scrutinised and Twitter’s warnings will pop up. Other examples include false narratives on the use of force, incursions or the use of weapons, misleading allegations of war crimes or mass atrocities against specific populations, and lies regarding international community response, sanctions, defensive actions, or humanitarian operations. However, strong commentary, efforts to debunk or fact check, and personal anecdotes or first person accounts will not apply to this policy.

Read Twitter’s blog post on the crisis misinformation policy:

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2022/introducing-our-crisis-misinformation-policy

The full policy can be read here:

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/crisis-misinformation

Read Ikigai Law’s articles on online content and moderation here:

https://www.ikigailaw.com/category/online-content/

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Ikigai Law

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