Twitter has opened up its Community Notes tweet context indicators to everyone. What that means is that everyone, everywhere can now view Community Notes attached to tweets, though only users based in the US can create them.
“People everywhere can now see and rate notes, helping to ensure notes are helpful to those from a wide range of views,” Twitter announced during the week. You can see notes that are currently rated helpful and showing on Twitter here. If you don’t see them yet, don’t fret, it’s in the process of rolling out,” the company added in a tweet during the week.
Community Notes was originally launched and called “Birdwatch last January as a means of expanding Twitter’s efforts to fight against fake information in tweets.
With Community Notes, contributors who are approved users within the Twitter community can add contextual notes to tweets that may include information that is potentially misleading.
Tweets with these notes then show up with an indicator in-stream, alerting users to the additional information. By so doing, Twitter is placing the ball at the courts of the users—which sort of indicate that they [users] and not Twitter dictate the rules. The people are then left with the responsibility of taking a decision on what is and is not acceptable; this is done via crowdsourced notes, reports Social Media Today.
How this helps minority views is anyone’s guess; but it is still early days and needs to be given time to see how it works.
Twitter’s Community Notes involves crowdsourcing fact checks directly from other users on the platform. However, in 2021, Twitter announced that participants be able to conceal their identity whenever they append a note to a user’s tweet. Twitter said it will automatically generate aliases for new Birdwatch users that are not publicly associated with their accounts.
The social media giant said users will have 5 random options to pick from when it comes to choosing an alias. It however adds that choices cannot be changed “at this time.”
Twitter is also rolling out profile pages that will make it easy to see the past Birdwatch of a user’s contributions. Twitter said this is necessary to ensure aliases do not come “at the expense of accountability.”
To this end, each note on a user’s public profile will include the current rating that contribution has earned. This is to let you know what the community thinks of it.
