By Alice Seeley
On March 3, Twitter announced it will be expanding Birdwatch, a crowdsourced fact-checking program, and selecting “a small and randomized group of people on Twitter in the US to see Birdwatch notes directly on some Tweets.”
Users will now be able to rate notes on if the information is helpful or not by rating the note as “Helpful,” “Somewhat,” or “No” and indicate why they answered as they did. The company hopes to expand the program to all 192 million Twitter users eventually.
Twitter Inc launched Birdwatch in 2021 and asked select Twitter users to identify misleading tweets and provide information to debunk the content, which would then be added to the original tweet. Birdwatch’s pilot program has 10,000 users but is only visible on a separate Birdwatch site. Keith Coleman, Twitter’s vice president of product, told NPR, “the idea is that people would be able to come away from Twitter better informed.”
Twitter claimed that Birdwatch is successfully helping to eliminate fake news. According to a survey done by Twitter, people were 20% to 40% less likely to agree with the content of a potentially misleading tweet after reading a Birdwatch note about it, compared to the users who saw the content without the note.
Twitter asked users to act in good faith and only report tweets containing false information. However, it’s not clear if that is always the case. According to an analysis done by The Washington Post, the average Birdwatch user was flagging only 43 tweets a day before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. After the invasion, the number increased to 156 tweets a day. It is unclear if the number of false information tweets increased or users simply reported tweets with which they disagreed.
