Community Notes, Twitter’s crowdsourced fact-checking tool, now accepts contributions from participants in Ireland, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia.
Over the weekend, Twitter announced it would add new participants to the program to increase its contributor count by 10% weekly. The social networking platform has also promised to welcome users from other nations.
As a result, users from these nations can now collaboratively contribute context to tweets that could be misleading.
We admit new contributors in batches, growing the contributor base by ~10% per week. We’re monitoring quality and continuing to expand to new countries over time.Twitter Community Notes
Community Notes, formerly Birdwatch, is Twitter’s user-driven program for content moderation that enables users to provide context for tweets to uphold content quality and lessen misinformation on the platform.
Twitter began adding new contributors in September, just before the US midterm elections. After a month, it allowed all US users to see the notes that contributors had included.
Anyone interested in participating in the program must have a six-month-old account and a verified phone number.
Twitter has been working to develop Group Notes into a form of crowdsourced fact-checking to reduce its internal commitments to content moderation and give Twitter users more control over what’s appropriate and inappropriate within the app.
The social network announced in December that Community Notes would be accessible to users worldwide. The contributions, however, were limited to those submitted by US-based users. The business is changing that with the most recent statement.
Problems With Stringent Requirements
However, the “trusted network provider” requirement seems to turn people away. Many have voiced concern that Twitter doesn’t provide a list of reputable carriers and that their network is unfit.
Since Musk advocates community-based moderation as the firm’s future, the company stated that such individuals would have to win their “contributor” status.
The firm may use SMS-based authentication to screen out carriers who have enabled spam accounts. But in this instance, the procedure must be open and collaborative with network providers to prevent spam.
Twitter updated its algorithm in November last year to recognize more low-quality Community Notes. As a result, users who write ineffective annotations and add context will have their contributor status suspended.
Furthermore, Community notes are now included in citation tweets. This update expands the influence of contributors’ work and provides a context where it’s beneficial.
It’s currently available on the web and will soon be available on Android and iOS. Twitter has also made changes to the Community Notes algorithm during the past few months, including:
- Adjusting the appearance of poor notes
- Broadening the scope of alerts to taxpayers, and
- Stabilizing the impact score of postings
After Musk’s acquisition, Twitter let off thousands of contract and full-time employees, including those managing content moderation, trust, and safety.
As a result, the social network’s capacity to restrict damaging content in return for retaining profitable advertisers on the network was compromised. So it should come as no surprise that the firm supports the initiative that makes people responsible for fact-checking.
