Twitter has rolled out the “Report Tweet” feature in the Philippines, Brazil, and Spain after the initial launch in Australia, South Korea, and the United States last year. The feature aims to curb the spread of misinformation, especially about COVID-19.

Since the pilot test of the feature in August 2021, Twitter said it received 3.73 million reports of 1.95 million distinct Tweets authored by 64,000 distinct accounts.

According to Twitter, it chose the three countries for the rollout because it wants “to learn from a small, geographically diverse set of regions — including those where English is not the primary language — before scaling globally.

Twitter starts labeling COVID-19 vaccine misinformation
Facebook, Google, TikTok, Twitter join PH health department in fight vs vaccine misinformation

The Philippines and Brazil have upcoming elections and the reporting feature will enable the social media platform to evaluate “how this reporting feature is used during civic events.”

“We’re always exploring and testing new ways to address potentially misleading information on Twitter,” Twitter said in its announcement. “As we scale our work in this space, we’re committed to drawing on feedback from the Twitter community to help us further understand the conversation and challenges around misinformation.”

Twitter is using an automation tool to scan violative content while it also has a monitoring team.

“We want to understand if and how public reporting options can improve the speed and breadth of our efforts to identify potentially harmful misinformation,” Twitter said.

From the test runs, Twitter learned that there is still a need to optimize how they filter and prioritize reports to drive efficiency before the company makes them available to everyone.

“We’ve been successful in improving action rates in other policy areas, like safety, by building machine learning models that predict the likelihood of violations,” Twitter said. “These models require research and training data (especially in languages other than English).”

Twitter also found that apart from misleading reports, the new feature also provides them with data on “”emerging trends and narratives.”

“Through the ongoing experiment, we have been able to identify more non-text-based misinformation shared on Twitter, including misinformation shared through third-party URLs and media,” Twitter said.