This seems like an insanely hard problem with many false positives/negatives. But of course the media hysteria against tech and fake news might eat it up and praise twitter. Nice PR move for non techies.
Depends if the praise they get for "at least they're doing something/not pretending the problem doesn't exist" outweighs the criticism they get for false positives, false negatives, inconsistency/bias, arbitrary judgements, response times, or labelling so many things fake that it becomes meaningless.
Way back in 1994, Time magazine published a photo of OJ Simpson that was photoshopped to make his skin darker [1] - but having some colour-correction of magazine cover photos is inevitable. The line between regular and deceptive colour correction is blurry, and some people will be upset no matter where you try to draw it.
[1] https://people.southwestern.edu/~bednarb/su_netWorks/project...
Meanwhile, there was an a very convincing deceptively-edited video circulating on Twitter which clamed to show parts had been sped up by overlaying the White House version on the original - it was very vivid, with the overlay seeming to jump ahead in fast-moving parts. This was an illusion created by running the videos 7 frames or so out of sync the whole way through and abusing the fact the slight differences weren't noticable in slow-moving parts during normal playback. No-one noticed. Youtube fighter of misinformation Captain Disillusion even helped spread it and gave his approval.
My general reckoning is that Twitter would get much more praise for labelling the non-tampered video as misleadingly edited and endorsing the accuracy of the video that was misleadingly edited to make the other one appear that way, than the other way around.
Attempting to label these so people aren't manipulated by it is something that deserves praise.
It's not a free pass of course, it does seem insanely hard, and it better materializes into something concrete with a real impact that does solve the issues at hand.
it's pretty incredible how we went from "give people the benefit of the doubt" to "people are manipulated".
I did not imply that everyone was de-facto manipulated by those. Only that it can already happen.
Except for all the purposefully manipulative things they allow on their platform and don't label or attempt to debunk.
You could say they're targeting the biggest problem first, but twitter isn't going to touch politician's tweets or the mainstream news en mass. If you're worried about the average twitter users' critical thinking skills, don't you think those important-sounding sources of information should be THE key targets of a anti-misleading or anti-manipulative campaigns?