September 8, 2022 – Twitter has announced that it is expanding the company’s crowdsourced fact-checking project called Birdwatch, which will help counter misleading tweets on the social-networking platform.
Birdwatch, which was launched in January last year, has been updated with a few changes and will be expanded to more contributors across the US. Birdwatch is a collaborative way to allow users to add informative contexts and notes to tweets that are misleading, according to a blog post.
“Only notes that are rated Helpful by a diverse group of contributors, or that ‘bridge’ across groups of people who have tended to disagree in their past ratings, are made visible on Twitter.” The company is launching a new onboarding process and the visibility of notes to increase the “positive impact of Birdwatch and enable healthier Twitter conversations”.
The updated Birdwatch onboarding process is aimed at incentivising contributors better.
“New Birdwatch contributors who have met the eligibility criteria will begin with an initial Rating Impact score of zero, which they can increase by consistently rating other contributors’ notes and reliably identifying those that are Helpful and Not Helpful. Once a contributor’s score has risen to five, they can start writing notes.”
The requirements for contributors include holding a verified phone number from an authentic US carrier, no violations of Twitter’s guidelines, and a maximum six months on the platform. The company will start adding larger groups of eligible applicants to the project more frequently and monitor if this change has any impact on the quality or frequency of contributions. The visibility of notes on public tweets will also be increased.
“In the coming weeks, more people using Twitter in the US will start to see notes on Tweets that Birdwatch contributors have collectively identified as Helpful,” reads the post. “Importantly, this doesn’t mean you’ll start seeing notes on every Tweet, simply that a larger number of you will start seeing notes that have been rated Helpful.”
The announcement comes ahead of the US midterm election. Last month, TikTok announced new measures to tackle misinformation and limit the violation of its policies ahead of the 2022 US midterm elections as well. The company also rolled out an in-app Elections Center, which will provide reliable voting information to its users.
