Twitter launches crowd-sourced fact-checking project

Twitter launches crowd-sourced fact-checking project

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Twitter is enlisting its users to help combat misinformation on its service by flagging and notating misleading and false tweets.

The pilot program unveiled Monday, called Birdwatch, allows a preselected group of users — for now, only in the U.S. — who sign up through Twitter. Those who want to sign up must have a U.S.-based phone carrier, verified email and phone number, and no recent Twitter rule violations.

Twitter said it wants both experts and non-experts to write Birdwatch notes. It cited Wikipedia as a site that thrives with non-expert contributions.

“In concept testing, we’ve seen non-experts write concise, helpful and easy-to-understand notes, often citing valuable expert sources," the company wrote in a blog post.

Twitter, along with other social media companies, has been grappling how best to combat misinformation on its service. Despite tightened rules and enforcement, falsehoods about the U.S. presidential election and the coronavirus continue to spread.

But if the effort is to work, Twitter will have to anticipate misuse and bad actors trying to game the system to their advantage.

To help weed out unhelpful or troll-created notes, for instance, Twitter plans to attach a “helpfulness score” to each one and will label helpful ones “currently rated helpful."

The company said Birdwatch will not replace other labels and fact checks Twitter currently uses — primarily for election and COVID-19-related misinformation and misleading posts.

The program will start with 1,000 users and eventually expand beyond the U.S.

San Francisco-based Twitter said it is trying to ensure that Birdwatch has a diverse range of perspectives and participants — an ongoing problem at Wikipedia, where many of the contributors and editors are white men.

“If we have more applicants than pilot slots, we will randomly admit accounts, prioritizing accounts that tend to follow and engage with different audiences and content than those of existing participants," Twitter wrote.

Twitter launches Birdwatch, a fact-checking program intended to fight misinformation

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Twitter has launched its Birdwatch program, meant to address misinformation on the platform by allowing users to fact-check tweets, the company announced Monday. Users in the pilot program, which will only include about 1,000 users in the US to start, will eventually be able to add notes to tweets to provide context.

For now, users participating in the pilot can write notes on individual tweets, but the notes won’t be publicly visible on Twitter itself, only on the public Birdwatch website. Pilot users can also rate notes submitted by other participants in the program there.

Here’s an example of what a tweet with the Birdwatch notes would look like:

“We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable,” Twitter VP of product Keith Coleman wrote in a blog post. “Eventually we aim to make notes visible directly on Tweets for the global Twitter audience, when there is consensus from a broad and diverse set of contributors.”

Twitter first confirmed it was working on Birdwatch last year, but it was not expected to release the program ahead of the US presidential election.

Today we’re introducing @Birdwatch, a community-driven approach to addressing misleading information. And we want your help. (1/3) pic.twitter.com/aYJILZ7iKB — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) January 25, 2021

Like most social media companies, Twitter has grappled with the spread of misinformation and propaganda across its platform. The company took steps to try to combat election misinformation during the US presidential campaign and after by labeling tweets with wrong or misleading information about the election. The program had mixed results, however, and did not appear to act as a deterrent to former President Trump, whose account was permanently suspended in January.

Twitter says it has interviewed more than 100 people across the political spectrum, who told the company that the Birdwatch notes provided useful context to better understand the tweets. “Our goal is to build Birdwatch in the open, and have it shaped by the Twitter community,” Coleman wrote.

All data contributed to Birdwatch will be available and downloadable in TSV files, and Twitter will publish the algorithms that power the program publicly in a Birdwatch Guide, the company said. The initial ranking system is available at Twitter’s GitHub page.

“We know there are a number of challenges toward building a community-driven system like this — from making it resistant to manipulation attempts to ensuring it isn’t dominated by a simple majority or biased based on its distribution of contributors,” Coleman noted. “We’ll be focused on these things throughout the pilot.”

To sign up to participate in Birdwatch, users can apply here.

Twitter launches community fact-checking feature to help tackle misinformation

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Twitter has begun trialling a community-driven approach to identifying fake news and misinformation on its platform as it looks to more effectively deal with the high levels of false and misleading information circulating.

With ‘Birdwatch’, Twitter users are able to identify information in tweets that they believe is misleading and write notes to explain why. Eventually, once there is a broad consensus, Twitter will make these notes visible directly on the problematic tweets.

“People come to Twitter to stay informed, and they want credible information to help them do so,” said Keith Coleman, Vice President of Product at Twitter, in a blog post. “We apply labels and add context to Tweets, but we don’t want to limit efforts to circumstances where something breaks our rules or receives widespread public attention. We also want to broaden the range of voices that are part of tackling this problem, and we believe a community-driven approach can help.”

For now, in its initial pilot phase, the feature is only available in the US and notes will only be visible on a separate Birdwatch site. Here, participants will be able to rate the helpfulness of the notes added by other contributors, but notes will not have any impact on how people see tweets or recommendations.

Twitter is also promising transparency from its Birdwatch feature by making all data publicly available and downloadable in TSV files and publicly publishing any code that goes into Birdwatch on GitHub.