The latest volley in that effort comes from Twitter, which on Monday
announced Birdwatch, a pilot project that uses crowdsourcing techniques
to combat falsehoods and misleading statements on its service.To get
more
twitter news, you can visit shine news official website.
The
pilot, which is open to only about 1,000 select users who can apply to
be contributors, will allow people to write notes with corrections and
accurate information directly into misleading tweets — a method that has
the potential to get quality information to people more quickly than
traditional fact-checking. Fact checks that are rated by other
contributors as high quality may get bumped up or rewarded with greater
visibility.
Birdwatch represents Twitter’s most experimental response
to one of the biggest lessons that social media companies drew from the
historic events of 2020: that their existing efforts to combat
misinformation — including labeling, fact-checking and sometimes
removing content — were not enough to prevent falsehoods about a stolen
election or the coronavirus from reaching and influencing broad swaths
of the population. Researchers who studied enforcement actions by social
media companies last year found that fact checks and labels are usually
implemented too late, after a post or a tweet has gone viral.
The
Birdwatch project — which for the duration of the pilot will function
as a separate website — is novel in that it attempts to build new
mechanisms into Twitter’s product that foreground fact-checking by its
community of 187 million daily users worldwide. Rather than having to
comb through replies to tweets to sift through what’s true or false — or
having Twitter employees append to a tweet a label providing additional
context — users will be able to click on a separate notes folder
attached to a tweet where they can see the consensus-driven responses
from the community. Twitter will have a team reviewing winning responses
to prevent manipulation, though a major question is whether any part of
the process will be automated and therefore more easily
gamed.Crowdsourcing models are as old as the Internet itself and are
most commonly associated with services such as Wikipedia, Quora and
Reddit. Each of these services has a model in which community members
and administrators debate content and arrive at a conclusion, with the
platform taking a limited curation and policing role. While Wikipedia’s
crowdsourced model is viewed as having been very effective, Reddit has
struggled.
Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey and Facebook chief
executive Mark Zuckerberg have both said they believe that the best
remedy for problematic speech is more conversation and dialogue — rather
than a censorship model in which content is removed or covered up. The
latter tack, which the companies doubled down on during the election and
its aftermath, did not make a huge dent in preventing misinformation,
and it also pushed many Trump supporters and right-leaning users to
smaller, ideologically friendly platforms.
The Wall