UPDATED 22:10 EDT / JANUARY 25 2021

POLICY

Twitter pilots a new misinformation fighting tool: Birdwatch

Twitter Inc. today announced the preliminary release of Birdwatch, its fact-checking function for users.

The program, which is specifically designed to address specious information that appears on the platform, is available to only 1,000 users in the U.S. right now.

Those users will be able to address information and tag it as misleading, adding more context. The added content won’t appear on Twitter itself, but a page allocated for Birdwatch. As time goes on and the feature rolls out to everyone, the added information will be seen on actual tweets.

As an example, Twitter showed a post that contained information about a mayor’s office wanting to convert all still water in local fountains to sparkling water. Users added to this post by stating the correct information with links, which does indeed say the mayor’s announced this, but it was from an April Fool’s jest. Twitter said in the pilot program users can rate each other’s note, presumably for accuracy and the depth of new information provided.

“People come to Twitter to stay informed, and they want credible information to help them do so,” Twitter said 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.”

The company announced it was working on such a program last year, adding that after conducting 100 interviews with people across the political spectrum who use Twitter, it was confident that this was a needed feature. Twitter said one thing that was gleaned was that a lot of those people wanted the community to address misinformation rather than Twitter being the central authority. Tags of “true” and “false,” people thought, weren’t good enough by themselves.

All the information that is added to Birdwatch will be available to the public as a downloadable file. How the algorithm ranks content will also be a code made available to the public.

“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,” admitted the company. “We’ll be focused on these things throughout the pilot.”

Photo: quotecatalog/Flickr

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