Twitter Teams Up With AP, Reuters on Misinformation

Twitter enlisted two heavyweights in the news sector to assist in its battle against misinformation on its platform: The Associated Press and Reuters. Senior director of curation Joanna Geary said in a blog post that her team currently helps provide context to enable users to make informed decisions on content by sourcing and elevating it from reliable sources. The curation team does this in the following places on the platform: Explore: The social network uses Moments created by Twitter and third parties, including news organizations, as well as Trends to help users catch up on a range of subjects that are of interest to them. Labels: In instances where a tweet violates Twitter’s misinformation rules on civic integrity, Covid-19 or synthetic and manipulated media, but the tweet remains visible on the platform, Twitter may add a label that links to a Moment with informative context on the topic, or to the Twitter Rules.Prompts: During high-visibility events, such as elections or public health emergencies, prompts in the Explore tab and timeline will link to public service announcement Moments including information from trusted sources, such as how to vote safely in a pandemic or trustworthy information about getting vaccinated.Search: When people search for a hashtag or a phrase, certain keywords determined by Twitter will result in content from trusted resources or Moments that debunk misinformation being displayed at the top.Trends: Additional context is attached to top Trends in the form of Moments, single tweets or written descriptions. Geary said the partnership with AP and Reuters will enable her team to increase its capacity to add reliable context to conversation on Twitter’s platform and boost the scale and speed of its current work, offering as examples: Ensuring that credible information is available in real-time around key conversations as they emerge, especially when facts are in dispute or when the social network’s curation team does not have specific expertise of access to a high enough volume of reputable reporting.Proactively providing context on topics garnering widespread interest including those that could potentially generate misleading information. Geary explained, “Rather than waiting until something goes viral, Twitter will contextualize developing discourse at pace with or in anticipation of the public conversation.”Improving the effectiveness of product features, with Geary saying the social network’s Birdwatch pilot will use feedback from AP and Reuters to help assess the quality of information surfaced by participants. AP and Reuters will focus on English-language content during the initial phase of the program with Twitter, and Geary said the plan is to eventually provide support across languages and time zones globally. Reuters head of user generated content newsgathering Hazel Baker wrote in the blog post, “Trust, accuracy and impartiality are at the heart of what Reuters does every day, providing billions of people with the information they need to make smart decisions. Those values also drive our commitment to stopping the spread of misinformation. We're excited to partner with Twitter to leverage our deep global and local expertise to serve the public conversation with reliable information.” AP vice president of global business development Tom Januszewski added, “AP has a long history of working closely with Twitter, along with other platforms, to expand the reach of factual journalism. This work is core to our mission. We are particularly excited about leveraging AP’s scale and speed to add context to online conversations, which can benefit from easy access to the facts.”

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Twitter Teams Up With AP, Reuters on Misinformation

The 2 news heavyweights will work with the social network’s curation team

David Cohen

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David Cohen