As the world continues to fight the COVID-19 pandemic and prepare for the global distribution of vaccines, people continue to turn to Twitter to discuss what’s happening and find the latest authoritative public health information. 

Earlier this year, we shared our approach around the conversation surrounding COVID-19 on Twitter and today we’re providing additional guidance on how we plan to address misleading information around COVID-19 vaccinations. Starting next week, we will prioritize the removal of the most harmful misleading information, and during the coming weeks, begin to label Tweets that contain potentially misleading information about the vaccines.

COVID-19: Our approach to misleading vaccine information

Many of you suggested we add categories for verification including academics, scientists and religious leaders, and we plan to explore adding dedicated categories for these to the policy some time next year. Until then, any of these individuals may qualify under the “Activists, organizers, and other influential individuals” category. For example, since March 2020, we have been working with global public health authorities to identify experts Tweeting about COVID-19 and have already verified hundreds of accounts as a part of this collaboration. These verifications will not be impacted by the new policy given the ongoing commitment to elevating credible information as it relates to the current public health crisis. 

You can read our new verification policy here, or you can tap on the blue verified badge in-app or on the web to learn more. 

We’ll begin enforcing this policy on January 20, 2021, which is also when we’ll begin automatically removing the verified badge from inactive and incomplete accounts. Our new policy defines a complete account as one that has all of the following: 

How your feedback shaped our policy

A couple of weeks ago, we announced that we’re planning to bring back our public verification program in 2021, shared a draft of our new policy, and asked for public feedback to help shape our approach. This new policy will lay the foundation for future improvements by defining what verification means, who is eligible for verification and why some accounts might lose verification to ensure the program is more equitable.

Public feedback has become a critical part of our policy development process by making sure our policies reflect the global nature of our service and the people who use it. In the two weeks during our public feedback period, we received more than 22,000 survey responses and learned so much about how we can improve our policy. Thank you for all you shared! 

How your feedback shaped our policy

Here are some of the areas we’ve updated in our new verification policy based on your feedback:

    We heard feedback that some of the criteria for a profile to be considered “complete” feels too restrictive, so we updated our definition to no longer require a profile bio or header image. 
    We updated our references to Wikipedia to better align with the encyclopedias' published standards for notability and article quality.
    We’ve clarified the titles of the “News” category to include “News and Journalists” and the “Sports” category to include “Sports and esports'' to be more inclusive. We also added a reference in our “Entertainment” category to more clearly include digital content creators. 
    We heard feedback that measuring the minimum follower count requirement on a per-country basis wasn’t always the right approach, so we’ve updated this to be on a per-region basis to make our follower count requirements less susceptible to spam and more equitable across geographies.


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