Twitter Begins To Implement Birdwatch Misinformation Monitoring Feature In The United States

Illustration (Pixabay)

JAKARTA - Since last October, Twitter has developed a monitoring feature that allows users to mark tweets as believed to be misleading. This feature called Birdwatch began to be tested in the United States (US).

Indeed, Twitter and other social media companies are under pressure to combat misinformation on their platforms.

Twitter last year began adding labels and warnings for misinformation on its platform, including about the COVID-19 pandemic and US elections.

Birdwatch is on a separate section of Twitter, twitter.com/i/birdwatch, and only pilot participants who register for the program can write notes to identify and refute misinformation.

Their notes will not initially be visible on Twitter to users outside of the pilot group, but will be visible on the Birdwatch website.

Twitter expects as many as 1,000 to 100,000 people to join Birdwatch on a rotating basis and will not be paid.

"Ultimately we aim to make the record visible live in Tweets for global Twitter users, when there is a consensus from a broad and diverse set of contributors," said Twitter vice president of products, Keith Coleman.

Participants can rate notes from other contributors.

"We know there are a number of challenges to building a community-based system like this one - from making it resistant to attempted manipulation to ensuring it is not dominated by a simple majority or biased based on the distribution of contributors," Coleman said.

"We believe this is a model worth trying," he added.