Twitter Extends Community Notes to Quote Tweets

Twitter extended its Community Notes crowdsourced fact-checking initiative to quote tweets. The company said in a tweet from its Community Notes account, “This change boosts the impact of contributors’ efforts and helps ensure that context is shown everywhere it can be helpful. Live now in the web app, and coming soon to iOS and Android.” Twitter owner Elon Musk added in a tweet of his own, “Twitter is arguably already the least wrong source of truth on the internet, but we obviously still have a long way to go. Enabling Community Notes to operate at very large scale and providing maximum transparency about how Twitter works are fundamental to building trust.” Community Watch debuted in January 2021 under the name Birdwatch, The social network detailed a new onboarding process last September that assigned new contributors who meet its eligibility criteria—a verified phone number from a trusted carrier based in the U.S., as well as a minimum of six months on Twitter, with no recent violations—with an initial Rating Impact score of zero, which they could increase by consistently rating other contributors’ notes and reliably identifying those that are helpful and not helpful. They could begin writing notes once their Rating Impact score reached five, and Twitter explained that they could continue to boost that score by writing and rating notes, but consistently writing notes that other contributors rated as not helpful would lower their score and potentially cause their ability to write notes to be temporarily locked. Twitter had roughly 15,000 Birdwatch contributors at the time, and it said it would begin adding about another 1,000 per week Last October, shortly before Musk’s takeover of the company, Twitter said users in the U.S. would begin seeing some tweets accompanied by notes containing relevant information about that tweet that was rated as “Helpful” by Birdwatch contributors, adding that most of those notes would provide additional sources for people who want to dive deeper into the subject matter. The company said at the time that users would be able to rate the notes they see in order to help Twitter understand whether or not they are helpful. Late last November, Twitter detailed updates to the algorithm powering Community Notes that identify more low-quality contributions in order to save contributors time and improve the average quality of notes and note writers. People who consistently contribute low-quality notes will lose the ability to write notes, and Twitter said it was working to improve contributor helpfulness scores with more data. Community Notes were made available for viewing worldwide last December, after previously being visible only in the U.S. Later that month, Twitter retroactively applied the requirements for new contributors to all Community Notes contributors, with the company saying at the time, “Contributors spend time and energy rating notes. Today’s change means that the typical note contributors see and rate will be of substantially higher quality, making better use of all of that time and energy.”

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Twitter Extends Community Notes to Quote Tweets

The crowdsourced fact-checking initiative was originally known as Birdwatch

David Cohen

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David Cohen