Twitter promises to tweak its 5G coronavirus tagging after unrelated tweets were flagged

Twitter says it is working to improve the way it labels tweets with problematic 5G or coronavirus content, after users reported that their tweets were mislabeled with a COVID-19 data check.

“In the past few weeks, you may have seen Tweets with tags that link to additional information about COVID-19,” Twitter Support tweeted. “Not all of those Tweets had potentially misleading content that associated COVID-19 and 5G.”

Twitter started checking tweets linking 5G and the COVID-19 pandemic earlier this month, adding the tag that says “get the facts about COVID-19” that links to a Twitter moment with “No, 5G doesn’t is causing coronavirus “Like its title. Part of a widely discredited conspiracy theory suggested that the spread of the coronavirus was somehow linked to the installation of new 5G mobile networks.

The fact check tag is part of the social media company’s broader effort to attach warning tags to provide context to tweets with misleading COVID-19 information. In April, the company went on to eliminate misleading tweets related to COVID-19 that it believed incited people to engage in “harmful activities.”

But the system that determines which tweets are flagged is apparently too anxious. It appears that tweets that include the words “oxygen” and “frequency” were tagged with the fact check tag. Week He postulates that “oxygen” and “frequency” may be keywords that trigger the label, as part of conspiracy theory suggests that 5G “frequency” is harmful to the extent that it “absorbs oxygen from the atmosphere.”

Yashar Ali / Twitter

Twitter Support says it is “creating new automated capabilities to apply these tags to Tweets that we think might be relevant,” adding that its goal was to reduce the number of misbranded tweets. It was not clear when the solutions would be applied.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for additional information on Saturday.