Twitter has launched an event page to keep track of the Covid-19 situation in Malaysia, ensuring users get real-time information from trustworthy sources.
The microblogging platform says the page works by prioritising tweets by authorities like government agencies, public officials, civil societies and media when people search for information regarding the virus.
“With a critical mass of expert organisations, official government accounts, health professionals, and epidemiologists on Twitter, our goal is to elevate and amplify authoritative health information as far as possible,” the tech company said in a press release.
It said it was consistently monitoring the conversation to make sure keywords, including common misspellings, also generate the search prompt.
In Malaysia, it partnered with the Ministry of Health (@KKMPutrajaya) and MyHEALTH (@MyHEALTHKKM), with prompts pointing users to their respective Twitter accounts.
The event page is located at the top of users’ home timeline for mobiles and under the #Explore tab on desktop. Malaysia is among the Asia Pacific countries with the feature, alongside Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Australia, India, Japan, Philippines, and South Korea.
Twitter’s global Trust & Safety team was also taking a zero-tolerance approach to platform manipulation and any attempts to abuse its service.
“We have recently expanded our safety rules to include content that could place people at a higher risk of transmitting Covid-19. We now require people to remove tweets that include content which increases the chance that someone contracts or transmits the virus,” it said.
That included misleading content supposedly from experts, denying expert guidance, and encouraging fake or ineffective treatments.
Advertisers that are “opportunistically” using the Covid-19 outbreak to target users with inappropriate ads will also be blocked from doing so, the platform added.
“We are currently prohibiting the promotion of all medical masks due to strong correlation to Covid-19 and instances of inflated prices globally,” it said, as an example.
Twitter also urged users to seek out authoritative health information, ignore the noise from dubious sources, and to think before they tweet.
Source:
TheStar