(AFP): Twitter announced that it will be rolling out a strike system against users tweeting misleading information about the COVID-19 vaccination.
The San Francisco-based company, in a blog post, introduced a “strike system” that will gradually escalate to a permanent ban after the fifth offending tweet.
“We believe the strike system will help to educate the public on our policies and further reduce the spread of potentially harmful and misleading information on Twitter,” the company added.
According to the company, the users will be notified when a tweet is labeled as misleading or needs to be removed for breaking the platform’s rules, earning a strike.
The second and third strikes will each result in the violating account being blocked for 12 hours. “With a fourth violation, an account will be sidelined for seven days. A fifth strike will get accounts permanently suspended,” Twitter added.
Since introducing its COVID-19 guidance, the microblogging platform has removed more than 8,400 tweets and challenged 11.5 million accounts worldwide, it said.
Twitter late last year began calling on users to remove misleading COVID-19 claims. The service also targeted baseless claims about adverse effects of vaccines or questioning the reality of the pandemic.
The strike system is similar to what Twitter applies to election-related misinformation, which led to former US president Donald Trump being permanently banned for repeated violations.
YouTube and Facebook are also among the online platforms that have taken steps to fight the spread of lies about the pandemic and vaccines.
