Twitter Inc. announced today that it’s expanding its efforts to reduce the amount of dubious COVID-19 vaccine-related content appearing on the platform.

In a blog post, the company revealed that from now on, when tweets appear that appear to contain false or misleading information about vaccines, labels will appear stating that. Twitter may also provide links to more credible content.

“We’ve observed the emergence of persistent conspiracy theories, alarmist rhetoric unfounded in research or credible reporting, and a wide range of unsubstantiated rumors, which left uncontextualized can prevent the public from making informed decisions regarding their health, and puts individuals, families and communities at risk,” Twitter said in a separate post.

To combat that, machine learning will be used so that the algorithm improves at finding similar posts to ones that have been flagged already. Twitter said human review along with automated detection will address the problem of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, although it “takes time to be effective.” For that reason, the technology will work first only in the English language.

People who have a post flagged will receive what could be the first of a series of strikes. Strike one will mean no action is taken against the transgressor, although a warning will be given. Those who receive another strike will have the account blocked for 12 hours. A third strike will result in a ban for the same period of time. A fourth strike will lead to a seven-day ban, and a fifth strike will mean the account is permanently banned, pending an appeal.

These are somewhat tougher measures than the company previously introduced of late. It seems that though the company has tried to tackle COVID-19 misinformation and vaccine misinformation, that hasn’t been enough. Since the implementation of COVID-19 guidance, Twitter said it has removed more than 8,400 tweets and challenged 11.5 million accounts globally.

“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,” Twitter said.

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