Twitter pilots misinformation reporting tool

In a tweet from the company’s Twitter Safety account on the social media platform, Twitter said the feature would allow users to flag to the company whether a tweet could be considered misleading.

The platform currently allows people to report tweets as either ‘abusive or harmful’ or ‘suspicious or spam’, while the new feature will create a separate category for ‘misleading’ tweets that would not fall into either category.

The feature will be initially trialled with “some people” in the US, South Korea and Australia, according to Twitter.

The announcement follows concerns in recent years over the amount of misinformation and false stories circulating on social media.

“We're assessing if this is an effective approach so we’re starting small,” Twitter Safety tweeted.

“We may not take action on and cannot respond to each report in the experiment, but your input will help us identify trends so that we can improve the speed and scale of our broader misinformation work.”