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Twitter wants to crowdsource fact-checking with Birdwatch

This definitely won’t be abused…

2020 really showed us just how powerful social media can be. It also made it very obvious that misinformation can spread on platforms like wildfire. Now, Twitter wants to do something about misinformation and tweet relevance, but needs your help.

Called BirdWatch, think of it as Wikipedia but for Twitter. Essentially, users will be able to add context to tweets. Twitter notes that this feature could come in handy for tweets that don’t explicitly break the rules but might be misleading or incorrect.

Twitter sees this rolling out to the full website at some point, but at first, it will only be available through a new portal at birdwatch.twitter.com.

Not just anyone will be able to add context to tweets, but it only requires a verified phone and email address, a trust US-based phone carrier, 2FA on your account, and you must be in good standings with Twitter. You can sign up here.

The company also plans to use algorithms to power reputation and consensus systems to make sure the best information is presented first.

While this is an interesting idea, I can’t help but wonder if and how this will be manipulated. This just seems like another way to muddy the water, but maybe I just don’t have enough faith in people. Wikipedia uses a similar system and it has mostly accurate information, but it isn’t immune from abuse.

Have any thoughts on this? Do you think Birdwatch is a good idea? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Former KnowTechie editor.

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