News and Commentary

Twitter Announces Birdwatch, A ‘Community-Based’ Tool To Fight ‘Misinformation.’ What Could Go Wrong?

   DailyWire.com
WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 5: Twitter chief executive officer Jack Dorsey testifies during a House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing about Twitter's transparency and accountability, on Capitol Hill, September 5, 2018 in Washington, DC. Earlier in the day, Dorsey faced questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee about how foreign operatives use their platforms in attempts to influence and manipulate public opinion.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images

On January 25th, Keith Coleman — Twitter’s Vice President of Product — announced that the social media giant would be launching a “community-based approach to misinformation.”

Dubbed “Birdwatch,” the product will pilot in the United States, and will allow “people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading and write notes that provide informative context.”

“We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable,” Coleman wrote. “Eventually we aim to make notes visible directly on Tweets for the global Twitter audience, when there is consensus from a broad and diverse set of contributors.”

The first phase of the pilot will make these “notes” available only on a separate Birdwatch site, on which “pilot participants can also rate the helpfulness of notes added by other contributors.”

“These notes are being intentionally kept separate from Twitter for now, while we build Birdwatch and gain confidence that it produces context people find helpful and appropriate,” continued Coleman. “Additionally, notes will not have an effect on the way people see Tweets or our system recommendations.”

Twitter first confirmed that it was working on this feature in October, and Birdwatch stands as the latest development in a recent history of changes meant to “address rampant misinformation on the platform.” These include the removal of content, the labeling of tweets with additional “context,” and a “manipulated media” designation. According to NBC News, “in just the final two weeks before the election, Twitter said it flagged some 300,000 tweets for ‘disputed and potentially misleading’ content.”

The use of crowdsourcing — obtaining information by leveraging the services of a large number of people — to flag supposed “misinformation” or “disinformation” is not itself new. In December 2019, a Product Manager at Facebook announced “a new pilot program built to leverage the Facebook community,” which would “allow fact-checkers to quickly see whether a representative group of Facebook users found a claim to be corroborated or contradicted.” 

According to the post, this system would first identify “potential misinformation using a variety of signals” using a machine learning model. Then, “if there is an indication that a post may be misinformation, it will be sent to a diverse group of community reviewers.” Finally, “community reviewers will be asked to identify the main claim in the post,” with Facebook’s “fact-checking partners” being “able to see the collective assessment of community reviewers as a signal in selecting which stories to review and rate.”

While Twitter have yet to release more information about Birdwatch, such an announcement is likely to spark concern among those who already see Twitter as a dishonest actor in the realm of “fact checking.” While the Facebook system is reasonably complex, with community reviewers only flagging pre-identified content for review by a specified group of “fact checkers,” Twitter’s proposed solution seems to remove several control levers, instead seeming to leave their chosen Birdwatch members free to determine which posts should be flagged, with no indication for what Twitter will later do with such information.

While the breadth of the program is being lauded, arguing that “the broader and more diverse the group, the better,” participants must still apply to take part. In its current form, given the deeply subjective nature of both politics and culture, Twitter are making the flawed assumption that the mob is always right, especially when the mob is hand selected.

The notion of throttling or demoting content based on community review has been applied in various forms by most social media companies. Birdwatch is likely to be a first step in providing some given “community” with additional influence or control over content on Twitter, moderated by the often anonymous and mysterious policy-makers at the social media giant.

Given Twitter’s fairly obvious bias against conservatives in recent months, it seems understandable that those on the Right would treat such promises of bipartisanship and diversity with disdain. If diversity of viewpoint is the goal, then Twitter should have an answer to how they would prevent Birdwatch participants — armed with complete freedom to flag content they view as false or misleading — from expanding upon the partisan divides we see across our society with an ever-escalating battle to out-flag the other side’s content. In the more likely scenario where there is bias among the Birdwatch participants, those who oppose social media censorship and anti-conservative moderation should be concerned that the Left are potentially being handed even more control over our online discourse.

We should wait to see what the next step in Twitter’s supposed attempt to combat misinformation and disinformation actually involves beyond vague and self-congratulatory press releases. However, we should also understand that Twitter is far from an honest actor in this field, and conservatives should be wary of further waves of online banishment which might follow as a result.

Ian Haworth is an Editor and Writer for The Daily Wire. Follow him on Twitter at @ighaworth.

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Already have an account?

Got a tip worth investigating?

Your information could be the missing piece to an important story. Submit your tip today and make a difference.

Submit Tip
The Daily Wire   >  Read   >  Twitter Announces Birdwatch, A ‘Community-Based’ Tool To Fight ‘Misinformation.’ What Could Go Wrong?