Twitter Adds New Rules For Those Who Want to Write in the Community Notes Feature

JAKARTA - Twitter recently launched the Community Notes feature, aimed at helping users avoid misinformation and hoaxes. Now, the company is setting new rules for using this feature.

"In September, we started asking new contributors to unlock the ability to write notes by first creating a valuable rating. This increased the average note quality so much that, today, we are retroactively requiring all contributors to meet this criterion to write notes," tweeted @CommunityNotes in its announcement.

It is explained that all contributors who wish to write in Community Notes can first assess the notes of other contributors in sufficient numbers, before they can write their own notes.

Rating Impact is also concerned with how often a contributor's rating helps the community identify records that later earn Helpful or Not Helpful status among a wider group of users.

So, existing or new contributors will be given the opportunity to rate notes and rate them in a way that reflects what the Twitter community will also rate. This helps weed out people who want to influence Community Notes with their own.

The ability to continue writing in Community Notes will be unlocked when a contributor has achieved a minimum of five Impact Ratings.

Citing The Verge, Thursday, December 22, notes that require a rating can be found under the Needs Your Help section of Community Notes to increase a contributor's Rating Impact.

Apart from that, there are also Writing Impact points for Community Notes creators which are also assessed based on audience feedback. If they can't maintain a high enough Writing Impact rating, those creators will lose the ability to write in Community Notes.

Community Notes, formerly known as Birdwatch is Twitter's community-based content moderation program that allows users to add context to tweets to maintain quality content and reduce misinformation on the platform.

Twitter users who wish to become contributors must meet the eligibility criteria listed in the Twitter FAQ, such as having no recent Twitter rule violations and having joined Twitter at least six months previously.

For the record, Community Notes have become a key focus of Twitter's new CEO Elon Musk, with the view that notes submitted by Twitter users themselves, could provide another way to build a more independent moderation process.

However, these new restrictions on who can write Community Notes do not explicitly come from Musk himself, but the changes could reduce participation in the crowdsourced content moderation service and, in turn, limit how often his comments are publicly corrected on the platform.