Twitter Inc. is expanding efforts to fact-check the service with the help of regular users through a program called Birdwatch.
(Bloomberg) — Twitter Inc. is expanding efforts to fact-check the service with the help of regular users through a program called Birdwatch.
The feature allows some users to write a “note” that can be attached to another person’s tweet to add additional context. A pilot version of Birdwatch has operated since early 2021, but most people still don’t see any of these notes attached to the tweets that appear in their feed. That will soon change — roughly half of Twitter’s US user base will start seeing such notes in the coming weeks.
Twitter also hopes to expand the group of users who contribute to Birdwatch. Currently it has about 15,000 people in the program, said Keith Coleman, a product vice president at the company, and Twitter hopes to start adding roughly 1,000 new users to Birdwatch every week.
Twitter fact checks some tweets that fall into specific categories, like Covid or election information. But the company doesn’t have as robust of a fact checking operation as Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. and has instead focused on labeling only the tweets with the most reach and impact.
The point of the Birdwatch program is to extend those fact checking efforts, and also to add context to tweets that might not technically be a violation of Twitter’s existing rules, but might still be misleading.
“One of the superpowers of Birdwatch is it can cover anything,” Coleman said. “It can cover any tweet that the people think would benefit from context. That space is huge.”
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