Twitter launches community-based Birdwatch to fight misinformation

The pilot programme allows users to flag tweets that they believe are misleading

Twitter has launched a new pilot programme as part of the efforts to address misleading information on the platform.

The community-based initiative, called Twitter Birdwatch, is currently available only for a limited number of users in the United States.

The programme will allow users to identify misleading information in tweets and to also add notes for informative context about the topic of the tweet.

Twitter said it hopes to build a "Birdwatchers" community that will eventually help to moderate tweets in its main product.

"We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable," Twitter VP of product Keith Coleman said in a blog post.

"Eventually we aim to make notes visible directly on Tweets for the global Twitter audience, when there is consensus from a broad and diverse set of contributors."

For now, the notes written by users will not be publicly visible on Twitter. Instead, they will be displayed on a separate Birdwatch website, where participants will be allowed to rate notes submitted by other users.

The data contributed to Birdwatch will be available in TSV files. The company also plans to publicly reveal in coming days the algorithms that power the Birdwatch initiative.

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are currently under pressure to keep misinformation and fake news from spreading on their services, especially after the 2020 US presidential election.

Last year, Twitter started adding labels and warnings on tweets containing misinformation, as judged by its employees.

Other tech firms have also been moving to combat toxic content. Microsoft released a set of new tools in September to help combat deepfakes, which it said could be used ahead of 2020 US election to spread false information.

Earlier in 2019, US research agency DARPA announced that it was launching a new project, called Semantic Forensics (SemaFor), intended to identify fake news. DAPRA said that SemaFor would create custom software capable of scanning more than 500,000 stories, videos, images and audio files to identify fake news stories on the web.

Twitter expects its pilot programme will help expand its ability to address misinformation, while also limiting the company's role in determining what is true or false.

The Birdwatch announcement comes after Twitter said it was permanently banning former US President Donald Trump on its platform over Capitol building violence on 6th January.

Twitter chief Jack Dorsey described it as the "right decision", although he accepted that it set a "dangerous precedent".

Dorsey admitted that Twitter has failed to create a platform that could sustain civil discourse and healthy discussions. He also acknowledged that such harsh decisions come with "real and significant ramifications" - specifically for a free and open internet.