Twitter will label the accounts of government officials and state-affiliated media outlets, following similar policies from Facebook and YouTube. The new labels are already being applied but will roll out gradually, with government labels being applied to officials from China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Twitter will also stop recommending tweets from state-affiliated media.
Twitter says it’s starting with “accounts of key government officials, including foreign ministers, institutional entities, ambassadors, official spokespeople, and key diplomatic leaders,” and that the “focus is on senior officials and entities who are the official voice of the state abroad.”
Initially, the labels will only cover officials from the US, UK, Russia, China and France, but Twitter says it plans to expand the feature to more countries in the future. The labels, which have already started showing up, appear in each account’s profile and within every tweet they send.
Twitter is following a similar move by Facebook, which added labels to state-owned media in June, and YouTube, which announced a labeling policy in 2018. However, Twitter is apparently the first major platform to explicitly lock these accounts out of its recommendation algorithms.
