After testing for over a year, Twitter is expanding the Birdwatch pilot program to a few random users in the US.
Twitter Birdwatch is a community-based fact-checking program aimed at addressing the misinformation on its platform, at a faster pace than the current flagging system. Twitter said it received a positive response from the community in the initial pilot tests, thus expanding it to general users.
Expanding Twitter Birdwatch
Twitter is one of the popular social media platforms where regular controversies take place. From politics to war and sports to celebrities, Twitter is used by prominent people, for updates and news. As the content flows from every direction, there are chances for misinformation or disinformation too.
And it should be addressed by Twitter before it’s impacting someone’s mind. As the current system of flagging misleading tweets to the Twitter team for reviewing is slow, the platform came up with a program called Birdwatch – a community-based fact-checking initiative started in October 2020.
In this, a group of 10,000 contributors works as a team to write notes and rate tweets that are potentially misleading. And this additional context is shown to people whenever they see those tweets. Twitter said it saw 20% to 40% of people who viewed the notes are less likely to agree with something of a potentially misleading tweet than those who didn’t see the note.
We’ve been hard at work building a Birdwatch that people from different points of view find helpful. We’re seeing promising results, and starting today, a test group of people in the US will see the highest rated Birdwatch notes on Tweets. https://t.co/7fIJJmOfcl
— Birdwatch (@birdwatch) March 3, 2022
As it turned out to be helpful, Twitter is now expanding the service to more users in the US for testing further. Though it didn’t mention a specific group, Twitter said “a small and randomized” group of U.S. Twitter users will see the Birdwatch notes directly on tweets.
Further, they’ll be able to rate the notes as “Helpful,” “Somewhat,” or “No” and write why they’ve answered as they did. This should help the Birdwatch improve.
