Twitter will soon start placing labels on the personal accounts of government officials. The labels are supposed to help users easily identify anyone associated with the government.
More Government Officials Will Get a Label on Twitter
According to a post on the Twitter Blog, the platform will start labeling the personal accounts of “heads of state” on February 17, 2021. It will affix labels to accounts associated with state-affiliated media as well.
Twitter is also expanding the reach of its labels to cover government officials in more countries. These locations include Canada, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, Germany, Honduras, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.
The platform hopes that these labels will help users “have a more informed experience on Twitter,” and also plans on tweaking the label’s text to “add more specificity” by “differentiating between individuals and institutions.”
Twitter’s first wave of labels for government-affiliated accounts was rolled out in August 2020. Initially, these labels only applied to the officials associated with the five countries in the United Nations Security Council, and didn’t include the personal accounts of those officials.
That said, these labels aren’t a blatant jab at misinformation, but they’ll still help users get more context about what they’re reading, and who it’s coming from.
Twitter Will Only Continue Expanding Its Labels
At the end of its blog post, Twitter noted that it hopes to expand its labels to “additional countries over time.” The label appears as a pale gray flag on a person’s Twitter profile, and it’s likely that you’ll come across it more often in the coming weeks.