In January 2021, Twitter introduced Birdwatch, a “community-driven approach” to fight misinformation and propaganda through Tweets on the platform.
The company introduced a pilot program for Birdwatch in the US alone as they slowly and steadily build the feature, make it smarter, more sophisticated, and more effective against curbing the spread of misinformation.
Birdwatch lets tweeters identify any kind of information presented in different tweets and provide notes if they find that the information is wrong, or misleading, or if it is inappropriate. Moreover, people can add notes to tweets to add deeper information to help people learn about something with a better context.
Now, Birdwatch has announced on Twitter that the company is experimenting with a new rating system for these contextual notes that people provide on various tweets. Through this rating process, the tweets that have at least one note “Rated Helpful” by others will be shown, most likely in a more prominent placement.
Twitter believes that this simple but effective rating system will make things more transparent than before. As of now, in the pilot, Birdwatch shows notes in reverse chronological order without any filtration. Now, however, notes that have been “Rated Helpful” will be shown more prominently and more easily. This way, the helpful notes will be elevated in position and placement, and this will bring more clarity and transparency to the overall initiative.
Twitter and Birdwatch believe that this rating system is deliberately kept extremely basic and overly simple and that it may have a lot of imperfections too. So, users must not think that this is an absolutely perfect solution. However, it is just an experiment to add more transparency and on an individual level, more context to various types of tweets. The company acknowledges that people from one school of thought may rate tweets that suit their ideology better, and that may not sit well with people who think differently or who belong to a different school of thought. This is a limitation that the company is going to work on too.
The eventual goal of Birdwatch is “to elevate context that a broad, diverse set of people find helpful and informative.” The company has promised to incorporate “diversity of contributors (not just number of ratings), as well as a reputation system, over time.”
It is a good initiative and if it works out, it will definitely help curbing a lot of misinformation going on the famous social media platform.
Read next: Twitter Is Expanding Its DM Voice Messaging In More Regions
The company introduced a pilot program for Birdwatch in the US alone as they slowly and steadily build the feature, make it smarter, more sophisticated, and more effective against curbing the spread of misinformation.
Birdwatch lets tweeters identify any kind of information presented in different tweets and provide notes if they find that the information is wrong, or misleading, or if it is inappropriate. Moreover, people can add notes to tweets to add deeper information to help people learn about something with a better context.
Now, Birdwatch has announced on Twitter that the company is experimenting with a new rating system for these contextual notes that people provide on various tweets. Through this rating process, the tweets that have at least one note “Rated Helpful” by others will be shown, most likely in a more prominent placement.
Twitter believes that this simple but effective rating system will make things more transparent than before. As of now, in the pilot, Birdwatch shows notes in reverse chronological order without any filtration. Now, however, notes that have been “Rated Helpful” will be shown more prominently and more easily. This way, the helpful notes will be elevated in position and placement, and this will bring more clarity and transparency to the overall initiative.
Twitter and Birdwatch believe that this rating system is deliberately kept extremely basic and overly simple and that it may have a lot of imperfections too. So, users must not think that this is an absolutely perfect solution. However, it is just an experiment to add more transparency and on an individual level, more context to various types of tweets. The company acknowledges that people from one school of thought may rate tweets that suit their ideology better, and that may not sit well with people who think differently or who belong to a different school of thought. This is a limitation that the company is going to work on too.
The eventual goal of Birdwatch is “to elevate context that a broad, diverse set of people find helpful and informative.” The company has promised to incorporate “diversity of contributors (not just number of ratings), as well as a reputation system, over time.”
It is a good initiative and if it works out, it will definitely help curbing a lot of misinformation going on the famous social media platform.
Why did we do this? With a priority on transparency, Birdwatch has shown notes in a pure reverse-chronological order, no filters. But we also want it to be easy to see which notes contributors have rated helpful.
— Birdwatch (@birdwatch) February 17, 2021
Read next: Twitter Is Expanding Its DM Voice Messaging In More Regions
