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Labeling Influential Social Media: Twitter Got It Right

That's the majority opinion in a new poll: 59 percent of respondents gave the move by Twitter to add warning labels—even to presidential tweets—a thumbs up. But Facebook took a drubbing.

Eric Griffith
 & Eric Griffith Senior Editor, Features

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Before everyone gets their feathers ruffled, this is a story about two social media giants and their differing styles. It's not about the politics (though, really, what isn't about politics these days?). Piplsay, a consumer insights analysis firm, simply wanted to know what people think of the approach to labeling problematic posts now taken by Twitter and Facebook, the two 800-pound gorillas of social media. It released survey results in a June 9th report, via infographic (below).

The background you probably don't need: Twitter decided in May to start applying labels to tweets that could use a little more rigorous fact-checking and/or that incite violence. A couple of those labels were stuck on tweets made by the commander-in-chief himself. (The aftermath is ongoing.) Facebook took another approach and said it wouldn't do that, ever, and gave Twitter a lot of flack for trying to be the "arbiter of truth." (The aftermath of that is also playing out, at least internally at Facebook.)

So which company got it right? Piplsay talked to 20,313 Americans ages18 and older via Market Cube over the weekend of June 6 and 7, 2020, to find out. First question: is Twitter right? 33 percent said yes, if the labeling program applies to all, and another 26 said yes, especially if the labels are used on "influencers." Combined, that's a 59 percent majority of people saying yes.

Facebook didn't fare as well with the same audience.; 46 percent of respondents said it is up to Facebook to "act responsibly." 32 percent said Facebook shouldn't regulate or verify public content.

In both cases, plenty of people had no opinion or weren't sure yet how it should go—16 percent on Twitter's actions and 22 percent on Facebook's response.

What will come next now that Twitter has pushed over one domino? Forty-six percent of respondents think it will encourage other platforms to regulate or verify content "in a good way." 14 percent thing it'll happen "in a bad way." And another 14 percent said it won't do much to encourage anyone else at all. Probably not until the President of the United States make his big leap to Instagram or Reddit, I suppose.

Related

Here's the full infographic below from Piplsay.

Piplsay infographic

Further Reading

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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