Twitter, which in recent months has launched numerous tools to fight against fake news and misinformation , such as tweets with limited responses , has launched a new functionality in some countries with which it hopes that users will be able to help to moderate the content on the social network.
It is called "Birdwatch" and is already available to some users in the United States, although it will arrive in other countries shortly . They will be the ones who can alert that content posted on Twitter is not truthful. Until now, they had the possibility to report this content, but… what is it that Birdwatch changes?
The platform allows users, with their participation, to determine whether content is disinformation or not. Messages that users mark as false will appear, initially, on a separate web page where users can add context information by posting notes and explaining why that content is not true. They will also be able to read the notes posted by other people and rate them, thus giving truth to the comments that indicate that a tweet is false or saying that it is not really false.
At the moment, these notes will only be seen on that Birdwatch website, independent, outside of Twitter , but the company's intention is that when the tool is mature, that content can be shown in some way also on the social network.
According to Twitter, these notes will not influence in any way the way users view content or its algorithm when recommending new content. For example, it will not be taken into account if the contents of a user have been marked as potentially false, since the next ones will also continue to be shown in the recommendations feed.
Twitter also ensures that, in order for the Birdwatch function to be fully transparent, all the data that this platform collects can be downloaded openly. In addition, the code of the algorithms that Twitter builds to shape Birdwatch will be published and its conditions of use will always be public.
Twitter hopes that, by analyzing the behavior of users and how they use Birdwatch, it will be easier for them to interpret all the data collected to create patterns that will make it easier to identify inappropriate content on the platform.
source / Twitter