Twitted failed to tame parody accounts, govt must frame guidelines: Experts

Parody accounts on Twitter were meant to post fun-laden tweets to delight the followers. Instead, they have become fake news factories, misleading the users on burning issues in India.
Twitter accounts that pose as another person, brand or organisation in a confusing or deceptive manner have seen a meteoric rise in India, tweeting misinformation to change the narrative of the day.
No one is spared in this misinformation war, be it politicians, mediapersons, celebrities and common Twitter users, who fall to the trap and retweet or file stories basis those parody/fake handles that have mushroomed on Twitter and the algorithms have miserably failed to track and flag/remove those.
In fact, India is such a big market for Twitter and it ought to have given far more attention to compliances under the Indian law, but it appears that there is a lot of gap between what the law wants Twitter to do versus what Twitter actually does.
Today, Twitter is infested with fake and parody accounts in India. Most of these accounts are being used for the purposes of targeting a particular person or for the purposes of forwarding or perpetuating a particular philosophy, political, religious or otherwise.

"Most of the fake accounts are targeting individuals, often hitting them below their belt so as to prejudicially impact the reputation, goodwill, standing or repute in society," Pavan Duggal, one of the nation's top cyber law experts and a seasoned Supreme Court lawyer, told IANS.

Twitter adds new labels, warnings to combat Covid-related misinformation

In order to deal with misinformation and provide more transparency in content on the platform, Twitter introduced new labels and warning messages that will provide additional context and information on some tweets that contain disputed or misleading information related to Covid-19.
The three broad categories the company will look at are misleading information, disputed claims and unverified claims.
In March, the microblogging platform adopted a new set of guidelines to address content that goes “against guidance on Covid-19 from authoritative sources of global and local public health information”.
Twitter’s internal teams and trusted partners will work to identify content likely to result in offline harm. However, embedded tweets and tweets viewed by people not logged in to Twitter may appear without a warning or label.
“This process is ongoing and we’ll work to make sure these and other labels and warnings show up across Twitter,” said Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of Site integrity and Nick Pickles, director, Public Policy Strategy at Twitter wrote in a blog post.
Monday’s announcement also includes using the new labels and warning messages to provide additional explanations or clarifications in situations where the risks of harm from a misleading tweet may be less severe, “but where people may still be confused or misled by the content. This will make it easier to find facts and make informed decisions about what people see on Twitter,” the officials said in the post.
“Earlier this year, we introduced a new label for Tweets containing synthetic and manipulated media. Similar labels will now appear on Tweets containing potentially harmful, misleading information related to Covid-19. This will also apply to Tweets sent before today,” they said.
The labels will link to a Twitter curated page or external, trusted sources of information.

Additionally, Twitter may also apply warnings to certain tweets, depending on the possibility of harm and type of misleading information.

Facebook behaved liked 'digital gangsters' by flouting privacy laws: UK MPs

International News:

A scathing British parliamentary report branded Facebook "digital gangsters" that knowingly violated data privacy and competition laws.
Lawmakers' 18-month investigation into disinformation and "fake news" also accused Facebook of failing to faithfully fight Russia's alleged attempts to influence elections.

Cultural select committee chair Damian Collins said Facebook "deliberately sought to frustrate our work by giving incomplete, disingenuous and at times misleading answers to our questions." Facebook co-founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg turned down three requests to appear before the committee.

"Companies like Facebook should not be allowed to behave like 'digital gangsters' in the online world, considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law," the report said.
"Social media companies cannot hide behind the claim of being merely a 'platform' and maintain that they have no responsibility themselves in regulating the content of their sites." The committee urged a compulsory code of ethics for all tech companies that would be overseen by an independent regulator.

It said Facebook should be obliged to take down "sources of harmful content" and disinformation.

 "We further recommend that the Government launches an independent investigation into past elections - including the UK election of 2017, the UK Referendum of 2016, and the Scottish Referendum of 2014 - to explore what actually happened with regard to foreign influence," the report said...Read More