Twitter has begun a week-long campaign directing Irish users to localised information on Covid-19 vaccinations, in a bid to make credible, reliable information more visible on the platform.
The social media company said it would roll out the timeline prompts from April 26th in Ireland, along with the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, India, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and UAE. The prompts, which will direct users to information on vaccine safety, vaccine availability, distribution plans, and so on, will be available in seven languages.
They will appear in the timeline of anyone with a Twitter account from those countries for a week.
Information
“As vaccinations roll out across the globe, people are looking for up-to-date, localised information about vaccine eligibility in their area, updates on vaccination sites, and the latest from their public health experts. While we continue to make reliable Covid-19 information available via our hub and localised search prompts, and continue to address misleading information about Covid-19, we’re expanding our efforts to surface credible Covid-19 information,” a spokesperson for Twitter said.
The company has previously used timeline prompts for campaigns for voter registration in the US, where it captured 94.9 million impressions over September 22nd to 24th, and early voting, for which a prompt ran from October 22nd to 26th got 87 million impressions.
Social media has come under fire in recent months for the volume of misinformation spreading on the various platforms.
Twitter has teamed up over the past year with health experts and public health organisations worldwide, including the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organisation, to give users easy access to accurate, credible information on Covid-19.
