Twitter’s crowd-sourced fact-checking program, Community Notes, is now open to contributors in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Twitter said over the weekend that it was increasing contributors by 10% each week by bringing new people into the program. The social media company has also promised to include people from other countries.
Community Notes is intended to allow users to add more context to tweets through links and reports. The program has been widely used to debunk or correct claims made in popular tweets.
Twitter introduced the social fact-checking program in the US last year under the name ‘Birdwatch’. In September, Twitter started adding more contributors just before the US midterm elections. A month later, it made notes added by contributors visible to all users in the US.
After Elon Musk Started Managing Twitter, He Renamed “Birdwatch” To “Community Notes” — Despite Former Twitter Chief Jack Dorsey think it’s the “most boring Facebook name ever.” Musk believed the project “is a game changer for improving accuracy on Twitter.”
In December, the social network said it was making Community Notes visible to people around the world. However, the contributions just came from users from the US. With the latest announcement, the company is changing that. For someone to join the program, Twitter requires them to have a verified phone number and six-month-old account.
However, one requirement that seems to put people off is a “Trusted Network Provider”. Many have complained that their network is not eligible and that Twitter does not have a list of trusted providers. It is likely that the company is filtering carriers that enabled spam accounts through SMS-based authentication. But in that case, it should be transparent about the process and work with network providers to prevent spam.
Last week, it also began showing these notes under quoted tweets in the iOS app and on the web.
In recent months, Twitter has also made several tweaks to the Community Notes algorithm, including changing the visibility of low-quality notes, expanding the type of contributor notesand stabilize the impact score of contributions.
Following the Musk acquisition, Twitter cut thousands of full-time and contract jobs, including people working on trust and safety and content moderation. This has impacted the social network’s ability to filter out and in turn retain harmful content high spend advertisers on the platform. So it’s not surprising to see the company pushing the program that puts the responsibility of fact-checking on users.
