Twitter enrolls its users to help combat the misinformation of its service, marking and noting deceptive and false tweets.
The pilot program unveiled on Monday, called Birdwatch, allows a preselected group of users – for now, only in the US – to sign up via Twitter. Those wishing to sign up must have a US phone operator, email and phone number verified and no recent Twitter violations.
Twitter said it wants both experts and non-experts to write Birdwatch notes. He cited Wikipedia as a thriving site with non-expert contributions.
“In testing the concepts, we saw non-experts writing concise, useful, 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 addressed the best way to combat the misinformation of its service. Despite stricter rules and enforcement, falsehoods about the US presidential election and coronavirus continue to spread.
But if the effort is to work, Twitter will have to anticipate misuse and bad actors trying to play the system to their advantage.
To help eliminate unnecessary or troll-created notes, for example, Twitter intends to attach a “utility score” to each and will label the useful ones “currently considered useful.”
The company said Birdwatch will not replace other labels and factual checks that Twitter is currently using – mainly for election-related COVID-19 and misleading posts.
The program will start with 1,000 users and will eventually expand beyond the US
Twitter in San Francisco said it is trying to make sure Birdwatch has a diverse range of perspectives and participants – a continuing problem at Wikipedia, where many contributors and editors are white men.
“If we have more applicants than pilot slots, we will randomly admit accounts, prioritizing accounts that tend to track and interact with different audiences and content than those of existing participants,” Twitter wrote.