Mashable: Facebook to add labels to climate change posts. “Facebook will add labels to posts related to climate change, as part of its ongoing attempt to wrangle misinformation spreading on the platform. Amid the chaos that is Facebook’s news ban in Australia, the social media giant announced the new feature on Thursday in a blog post.”
The Markup: Trump’s False Posts Were Treated with Kid Gloves by Facebook. “Overall, we gathered Facebook feed data from more than 2,200 people and examined how often those users saw flagged posts on the platform in December and January. We found more than 330 users in the sample who saw posts that were flagged because they were false, devoid of context, or related to an especially controversial issue, like the presidential election. But Facebook and its partners used the ‘false’ label sparingly—only 12 times.”
BuzzFeed News: Facebook Knows That Adding Labels To Trump’s False Claims Does Little To Stop Their Spread. “The labels Facebook has been putting on false election posts from President Donald Trump have failed to slow their spread across the platform, according to internal data seen by BuzzFeed News.”
Twitter Blog: New labels for government and state-affiliated media accounts. “Twitter provides an unmatched way to connect with, and directly speak to public officials and representatives. This direct line of communication with leaders and officials has helped to democratize political discourse and increase transparency and accountability. We also took steps to protect that discourse because we believe political reach should be earned not bought. In 2019, we banned all state-backed media advertising and political advertising from Twitter. Today we’re expanding the types of political accounts we label.”
Mashable: Facebook sued by news media outlet over ‘Russia state-controlled’ label. “Maffick LLC has filed a lawsuit against Facebook over the foreign-controlled label that the social media giant puts on all of its pages and posts. Maffick runs popular Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts for online news media outlets such as In the NOW, Waste-Ed, and Soapbox. You’ve probably come across Maffick’s Facebook page for ‘In the NOW.’ With nearly 5 million followers on the social media platform, In the NOW’s video content is regularly shared on Facebook.”
Poynter: How users see Facebook’s labels will determine their effectiveness. “We can’t say it enough: A label is not a fact-check. Twitter said as much when it applied a label to the Trump tweet in May. Susan discussed this in the May 28 edition of Factually, and predicted more fights to come over these labels. The question is how users will see the Facebook labels. Even though they’re not fact-checks, will they inadvertently send a signal that the content is questionable?”
The Verge: Twitter promises to fine-tune its 5G coronavirus labeling after unrelated tweets were flagged. “Twitter says it’s working on improving how it labels tweets with problematic 5G or coronavirus content, after users reported their tweets were being mislabeled with a COVID-19 fact-check.”
Notre Dame News: In Trump v. Twitter: ‘Twitter will win’. “As America’s general election looms, Tim Weninger, the Frank M. Friemann Collegiate Associate Professor of Engineering in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Notre Dame, discusses the current state of social media, the dangers of disinformation and how users can get smarter about what they share.”
CNN: Facebook will start labeling pages and posts from state-controlled media. “The labels will immediately start appearing on pages belonging to outlets such as state-run Russia Today and China’s Xinhua. Starting next week, users in the United States will start to see the label appear on these outlets’ individual posts — labels that will eventually be introduced in other countries.”
