Twitter’s crowdsourced 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 expanding the supporter base by 10% per week by adding new people to the program. The social media company has also promised to include people from other countries.
Community Notes aims 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 last year in the US under “Birdwatch”. In September, Twitter began 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 began running Twitter, he changed the name from “Birdwatch” to “Community Notes,” despite former Twitter boss Jack Dorsey. thinking is the “most boring Facebook name ever”. Musk believed that the project “It’s a game changer for improving accuracy on Twitter.”
In December, the social network said it’s making Community Notes visible to people around the world. However, the contributions only came from users based in the US. With the latest announcement, the company is changing that. If someone wants to join the program, Twitter requires that they have a verified phone number and a 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 carriers. The company is likely filter out carriers that facilitated spam accounts via SMS-based authentication. But in that case, you need to be transparent about the process and work with network providers to prevent spam.
Last week, it also began showing these notes in quoted tweets on the iOS app and on the web.
In recent months, Twitter has also made several adjustments to the Community Notes algorithm, including changing the visibility of low-quality notes, expanding the type of notes for taxpayersand stabilize the impact score of contributions.
After the Musk acquisition, Twitter has eliminated thousands of full-time and contract jobs, including people who work in trust and safety and content moderation. This has affected the ability of the social network to filter harmful content and, in turn, keep advertisers who spend a lot on the platform. So it’s not surprising to see the company pushing the program that puts the onus on users for fact-checking.
