Twitter announces ‘Birdwatch’ encouraging users to police one another’s Tweets

Twitter has announces “Birdwatch” a new feature which encourages users to police and flag each other’s tweets if they believe the content of the tweet is spreading misinformation. The company claims it wants to “broaden the range of voices” in helping with the fight against misinformation, but this feature could easily devolve into flagging wars between different factions of users, neither of which is knowledgeable about the actual facts.

Here is the Tweets:

Today we’re introducing @Birdwatch, a community-driven approach to addressing misleading information. And we want your help. (1/3)

We’re looking for people to test this out in the US –– you can add notes with helpful context to Tweets that you think are misleading. For now, these notes won’t appear directly on Twitter, but anyone in the US can view them at: https://birdwatch.twitter.com (2/3)

We’ll use the notes and your feedback to help shape this program and learn how to reach our goal of letting the Twitter community decide when and what context is added to a Tweet. For details and how to apply to be a part of Birdwatch: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introducing-birdwatch-a-community-based-approach-to-misinformation.html… (3/3)

The company posted an animated video with a brief example of the feature which can be seen below:

Read More: Twitter Encourages Users to Snitch on Each Other with ‘Birdwatch’ Feature