Social media platform Twitter has started labeling tweets that may contain misinformation on the COVID-19. This is one of the company’s efforts in protecting public conversation surrounding COVID-19.

Twitter started to roll out its COVID-19 guidelines last year in an effort to provide a venue for a healthy public discourse that should be useful for people to understand the necessity of getting a vaccine. The company said in a blog post that it has, so far, removed more than 8,400 tweets and challenged 11.5 million accounts worldwide.

Twitter designated a team that will sift through tweets that are deemed harmful and violate the platform’s policies. Armed with guidelines for their judgment, the team will then update its automation tools to find tweets that may resemble or sound like the tweet that has been flagged.

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“Our goal is to eventually use both automated and human review to address content that violates our COVID-19 vaccine misinformation rules,” Twitter said. “Machine-learning and automated language processing takes time to be effective. As such, we will begin with English-language content first and use this same process as we work to expand to other languages and cultural contexts over time.”

The labels are visible to all Twitter users and shall be followed to the more authoritative curated content on COVID-19. Its explore features are still up hoping to redirect users to official public health information.

The newly introduced strike system will enable Twitter to take further actions, if necessary, especially to those accounts that remain persistent.

“We believe the strike system will help to educate the public on our policies and further reduce the spread of potentially harmful and misleading information on Twitter, particularly for repeated moderate and high-severity violations of our rules,” the company said.

One strike: No account-level action
Two strikes: 12-hour account lock
Three strikes: 12-hour account lock
Four strikes: 7-day account lock
Five or more strikes: Permanent suspension