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Twitter has to fine-tune its COVID-19 and 5G fact-checking

Some how, through rampant conspiracy theories and outright lies, 5G became linked to COVID-19.

Despite there being no link between the two, conspiracy theories about how 5G are going to help those in power, shuffle in a new world order by making the world sick, are rampant.

At around the time that 5G and COVID-19 conspiracy theories began to gain popularity, social media platforms began implementing measures to curb the spread of misinformation. But it seems as if Twitter may have been a bit over zealous with its measures.

“In the last few weeks, you may have seen Tweets with labels linking to additional info about COVID-19. Not all of those Tweets had potentially misleading content associating COVID-19 and 5G. We apologize for any confusion and we’re working to improve our labeling process,” the Twitter Support account tweeted at the weekend.

So how over zealous was Twitter?

According to a report by The Verge, a tweet containing the words “frequency” and “oxygen” was enough to get a warning slapped on the tweet.

It’s unclear why this happened but reports suggest that some content regarding COVID-19 and 5G conspiracies might be behind why frequency and oxygen had a warning attached.

Twitter says that while the labels on its tweets provide additional context for 5G and COVID-19 but add that it is working to show this contextualisation on fewer unrelated tweets.

When exactly we will see this is unclear but for now perhaps avoid tweeting out “frequency” and “oxygen” so as not to get a warning slapped on your tweets.

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