Twitter has announced that it will send users a notification when the tweet they have previously engaged with receives a new Community Note.
Community Notes is a crowdsourced fact-checking program that allows contributors to add supplementary context to a tweet through reports and links. It is aimed at allowing users to identify misinformation and correct misleading claims made in popular tweets.
“Starting today, you’ll get a heads up if a Community Note starts showing on a Tweet you’ve replied to, Liked or Retweeted,” reads a tweet on Community Notes’ official account. “This helps give people extra context that they might otherwise miss.”
Starting today, you’ll get a heads up if a Community Note starts showing on a Tweet you’ve replied to, Liked or Retweeted. This helps give people extra context that they might otherwise miss. pic.twitter.com/LIcGgl2zdJ
— Community Notes (@CommunityNotes) February 21, 2023
The Community Notes program was launched in 2021. First rolled out in the US as “Birdwatch”, the initiative was expanded to include four more countries. The program was renamed by Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk, who ramped up developments related to the feature and made Community Notes an integral part of his vision for “Twitter 2.0”.
Community Notes engages contributors who provide informative context to tweets they believe are misleading. According to Twitter, when a note is rated helpful by a sufficient number of contributors, it is publicly shown on a tweet.
Musk has called Community Notes a “gamechanger” to fight wrong information. Twitter says that the fact-checking program is “open and transparent” and comprises an open-source algorithm, which is available on GitHub “along with the data that powers it so anyone can audit, analyze or suggest improvements”.
Nice work by Community Notes team!
In general, Community Notes is a game changer for combating wrong information. https://t.co/i8qo5QdHUQ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 21, 2023
Community Notes do not reflect Twitter’s viewpoints and cannot be edited or modified by its team. The tweet that receives Community Notes from contributors will not be labelled, removed or addressed by Twitter unless it constitutes violations of the platform’s community guidelines and privacy policy.
Similarly, if a user believes that the notes are not in accordance with these rules, they can report them to Twitter either through the “Report” option or by filling out an online form.
