Twitter Community Notes Can Now Be Read Worldwide

Twitter users globally can now view Community Notes, which were previously available only in the U.S. Crowdsourced fact-checking initiative Community Notes was known as Birdwatch in the pre-Elon Musk days. The social network said in a tweet from the Community Notes account that Community Notes that are rated as helpful can be seen here, and the ability to view them is in the process of rolling out. Twitter added in its tweet, “People around the world who want to have additional impact—including writing notes—can now sign up here. As there are important nuances in each market, we’ll expand the contributor base country-by-country. We’ll add contributors from a first new country soon.” Twitter introduced the Birdwatch program in January 2021, inviting contributors to flag potentially misleading information in tweets and write notes providing context. In September, the social network detailed a new onboarding process 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 In 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 month, 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.

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Twitter Community Notes Can Now Be Read Worldwide

The crowdsourced fact-checking initiative was previously known as Birdwatch

David Cohen

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David Cohen