TWITTER MATTERS OF FACT

Checks may be costly

Twitter’s feud with President Trump may end up costing the social networking company, Wall Street analysts forecast.

By moving to flag and factcheck tweets from the president, the Jack Dorsey-run company is opening itself to intense scrutiny of its practices in ways that could force it to expand the 1,500-strong content moderation team policing its platform.

“From a volume and user perspective, Twitter trying to do this with full accuracy would be like trying to count grains of sand at the beach,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives told The Post.

Twitter last month announced that it would begin adding fact-checking labels to disputed or misleading tweets about the corona virus amid fears that hoaxes were running rampant across the internet. It then expanded these labels to include misleading content related to election integrity only after flagging a Trump tweet where he claimed that mail-in ballots are“substantially fraudulent .”

The label, which included a link telling users to “get the facts about mail-in ballots,” prompted allies of the president to question why similar warnings hadn’t been placed on other prominent Twitter users’ tweets, including a Chinese government spokesperson who accused the US of causing the coronavirus pandemic.

Twitter only slaps misinformation labels on tweets it deems misleading if they have been generated by a public official. Everyone else just gets suspended or even banned from Twitter, depending on their track record.

But scores of public officials also use Twitter, including mayo rs, state officials, police officers, federal agencies—not to mention foreignleaders, experts noted.

“I think if you are starting to go down the road of fact checking, then presumably you’re going to need more fact checkers,” Third Bridge analyst Scott Kessler said. “This has been done before in various contexts and it definitely costs money .”

In a statement to The Post, a Twitter spokesperson said it does not foresee any additional hi res to its team.

“We a restaffed appropriatelyfor the work. Protecting the public conversation is work that is done by teams across the company, including product, trust and safety, cu ration and Twitter Service,” the spokesperson said.

But analysts are skeptical given that Twitter’s content review operation is so much smaller than that of its competitors. Facebook, for example, has about 35,000 people working on“safety and security ”— and MarkZuc ker berg( see sidebar) has so far refused to follow when it comes to scrutinizing posts by public officials.