Twitter is used for a lot of different kinds of things, but one of the most important uses that people have found for it is that it can be a pretty great overall source of information. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that there is also a lot of biased information, misinformation and fake news on the platform which is dangerous for a lot of reasons that have started to become clear.
In an attempt to make it so that the quality of information can be at the very least somewhat improved on its platform, Twitter created something called Birdwatch. The purpose of this was to allow users to create a note if a tweet that they saw considered information that might not be up to date or fully accurate, but that is also the sort of thing that can be misused with all things having been considered and taken into account. Some people might report tweets that are perfectly legitimate, for example.
That’s especially common in situations where people see tweets that don’t align with their worldview, and Twitter is trying to curb that by allowing users to start giving their opinions on the notes that are present on the separate Birdwatch site. You will now have two options to look into when you see a note. These two options would involve you being able to mark the note as Helpful or Unhelpful according to your opinion, although you would also have to try to justify it by selecting one of the reasons provided.
For example, if you read a note for a tweet and feel like it uses biased language, you can mark it as Unhelpful. If enough people do that, others reading the note would know that it might not be the most trustworthy thing for them to end up looking into. You can also mark the note as Helpful if it doesn’t use biased language, and that way more people would be able to take it seriously and take the information presented in the tagged tweet with a grain of salt.
One change to this is that you can also select argumentative language as one of your justifications. Twitter has expanded other aspects of this as well, including the “Misses key points” tag being lengthened to “Misses key points or irrelevant”. This will most definitely improve the level of discourse that people might be seeing on Twitter which can help create a situation wherein you can go about fact checking any and all tweets that you can see on the Birdwatch site and weighing in on them as well.
Read next: Twitter Makes Changes to Conversation Prompts
In an attempt to make it so that the quality of information can be at the very least somewhat improved on its platform, Twitter created something called Birdwatch. The purpose of this was to allow users to create a note if a tweet that they saw considered information that might not be up to date or fully accurate, but that is also the sort of thing that can be misused with all things having been considered and taken into account. Some people might report tweets that are perfectly legitimate, for example.
That’s especially common in situations where people see tweets that don’t align with their worldview, and Twitter is trying to curb that by allowing users to start giving their opinions on the notes that are present on the separate Birdwatch site. You will now have two options to look into when you see a note. These two options would involve you being able to mark the note as Helpful or Unhelpful according to your opinion, although you would also have to try to justify it by selecting one of the reasons provided.
For example, if you read a note for a tweet and feel like it uses biased language, you can mark it as Unhelpful. If enough people do that, others reading the note would know that it might not be the most trustworthy thing for them to end up looking into. You can also mark the note as Helpful if it doesn’t use biased language, and that way more people would be able to take it seriously and take the information presented in the tagged tweet with a grain of salt.
One change to this is that you can also select argumentative language as one of your justifications. Twitter has expanded other aspects of this as well, including the “Misses key points” tag being lengthened to “Misses key points or irrelevant”. This will most definitely improve the level of discourse that people might be seeing on Twitter which can help create a situation wherein you can go about fact checking any and all tweets that you can see on the Birdwatch site and weighing in on them as well.
Read next: Twitter Makes Changes to Conversation Prompts