Twitter is asking its users for help in fighting false news.
It has announced a pilot project that allows people to submit notes on tweets that may be false or misleading.
What Is Birdwatch?
The program, called ‘Birdwatch’, will be tested among a small group in the US initially. The company has agreed that the new system will have to “resist fraudulent efforts”.
Companies like Twitter are looking at how they can better balance their platforms.
Twitter said on Monday: “We know this might be messy and have problems at times, but we believe this is a model worth trying.”
Twitter, along with other large social media companies, has struggled to deal with disinformation on its platform.
The pilot will allow users to mark tweets they believe are “misleading or false”, provide evidence to the contrary and discuss them with other – on a separate ‘Birdwatch’ site.
Additional notes and flags will then be added to the content.
Twitter’s Statement
Twitter claims that this new approach could help it respond more quickly when misleading information spreads.
“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 said.
Fighting Misinformation
Twitter is already adding labels to some misleading news. For example, many of Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud were labelled by the company.
Twitter also has the right to remove tweets – and in extreme cases block users – this was done to the US president following the Washington riots earlier this month.
Twitter, though, wants to go further: “We don’t want to limit efforts to circumstances where something breaks our rules or receives widespread public attention,” said Twitter’s Vice-President Keith Coleman.
Participants will be required to provide a verified phone number and email in order to participate, for the purpose of keeping bots and bad actors away, as well as having no recent rule violations against their Twitter account.
President Biden said in his inauguration speech that: “We must reject a culture where facts are manipulated, or even manufactured.”
