Twitter announced Thursday, August 6 that it will start labeling state-affiliated media accounts on its platform in order to ensure “transparency” to users who interact with those accounts.
The company said that by labeling the accounts, users will be able to make “informed decisions about what they see and how they engage on Twitter.” The move comes after Twitter’s November announcement that state-affiliated media accounts will no longer be able to advertise on the site, a move designed to protect “healthy discourse and open conversation.”
“For clarity: we don’t let state-affiliated media accounts advertise on Twitter,” the company added in a tweet Thursday. “We’ll also no longer include them or their Tweets in recommendations, as we continue to support a free and independent press.”
Twitter’s move Thursday comes after months of a string of other product feature updates aimed to quell the spread of misinformation and targeted harassment. Within the last year it introduced a way to hide replies to tweets, control who is allowed to reply to tweets, and even installed a prompt to ensure users read an article before retweeting it.
For clarity: we don't let state-affiliated media accounts advertise on Twitter. We’ll also no longer include them or their Tweets in recommendations, as we continue to support a free and independent press.
More on this policy and new labels: https://t.co/BY1jTO46Zc (2/2)
— Support (@Support) August 6, 2020
Twitter became one of the first major social media companies to ban politically funded advertisements on its platform in 2019. CEO Jack Dorsey said that political ads have the capability to dampen public discourse, spread misinformation, and manipulate videos.
Going forward, all state-funded and affiliated media accounts, foreign ministers, ambassadors, government spokespeople, and diplomatic leaders will be labeled under their account name. As it stands now, the labels will only apply to the five countries in the United Nations Security Council: Russia, the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and China.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?
Instagram is testing a new format for long-form videos called Features. It allows select creators to upload horizontal videos running up to 90 minutes long. Instagram has already tested the new format with creators in Brazil, and now, it's expanding to tens of thousands of creators across the US.
How will Instagram's new Features format work?