Tweets Become Harder to Believe as Labels Change Meaning

Alyssa Kahn, a research associate at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, said Twitter under Mr. Musk was systematically dismantling safeguards that had been put in place over years of consideration and controversy.

“When there are so many things going wrong at once, it’s like: Which fire do you put out first?” she said.

After a public dispute with NPR, which Twitter falsely labeled state-affiliated media, the platform last week removed all labels that had identified state-owned media, including those controlled by authoritarian states like Russia, China and Iran.

That, coupled with a decision to stop blocking recommendations for them, has coincided with a spike in engagement for many of these accounts, according to research by the Digital Forensic Research Lab and another organization that studies disinformation, Reset, which is based in London.

In Sudan, new accounts on Twitter are falsely representing both sides of the civil war that has erupted there. One account that, presumably, bought a blue check mark falsely proclaimed the death of Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, the leader of the rebel Rapid Support Forces. More than 1.7 million people viewed the tweet.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/26/technology/twitter-verification-problems.html