Twitter: Fights misinformation with "Birdwatch"

The Twitter revealed one a new feature aimed at stepping up its efforts to combat misinformation, with the help of users of. The new system of Twitter, is called “Birdwatch”And allows users discuss and provide information on tweets, which in their opinion, could be misleading and spread misinformation.

Birdwatch is a standalone section of Twitter that will initially only be available to a small group users.

"Birdwatch lets people recognize information to Tweets that they believe are misleading or false and to write notes that provide an informative framework ”, wrote the Twitter executive, Keith Coleman. "We believe that this approach will allow us to respond quickly to the spread of misleading information.".

Birdwatch will initially be a separate section of Twitter, but gradually the notes will be visible directly to Tweets, for the entire Twitter audience.

From some of the first Birdwatch demos, it seems to exist a separate place where various tweets are discussed and evaluated, in a way that combines elements of the monitoring tools of both Reddit and Wikipedia.

Birdwatch users can highlight a tweet from a drop-down menu directly on the main Twitter interface, but the discussion about possible misinformation remains solely in the Birdwatch section.

Birdwatch participants are able to evaluate the notes and remarks of the other participants, in order to prevent a possible attempt by the users of Birdwatch to present a tweet as fake (while it is not). These ratings are then compiled into a Birdwatch profile.

Twitter said it hopes to create one Birdwatchers community who will be able to help monitoring and tagging tweets spreading misinformation.

Last year, Twitter was faced with the difficult task of detecting and dealing with misinformation on its platform several times. In March, there was one big wave of misinformation about pandemic and Twitter began removing "misleading and potentially harmful content" about him COVID-19. By May, he had introduced tags for the tweets they contained theories conspiracy about the origin of the disease and false therapies.

In the following months, the social networking platform identified and removed thousands of tweets for "questionable and potentially misleading" content.

Twitter is focused to the threat of "manipulation" and misinformation from what he calls "swarms" of malicious people, who seek to use the platform as another weapon for cyber-information wars.

Coleman said there are many challenges to building one systemic community-based, such as Twitter. It is difficult to be resistant to manipulation attempts but the platform makes a lot of efforts for this purpose.

In addition, according to the platform, The researchers they can take data on Birdwatch entries, and Twitter hopes that this “will allow experts, researchers and the public to analyze or test BirdwatchAnd to prevent misinformation attempts.

"We know this can sometimes be a problem, but we think it's worth trying", Wrote Coleman.

Source: NBC News