Twitter Rolls Out “Community Notes” Globally.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

It is only Monday, but shaping up to be an exciting (depending on who you ask) and newsworthy week for Twitter. Twitter Blue has jus relaunched and “Blue For Business” is being introduced. Over the weekend Twitter announced Community Notes (formerly known as Birdwatch, the social media giant’s crowdsourced fact-checking system is being rolled out globally.

The feature allows users to add context to tweets and takes an open source approach toward debunking misinformation. Moderators who are part of the program can add notes to tweets to add context and users can then vote if they determine the context to be helpful. Prior to this global expansion, Community Notes were only visible to users in the U.S. Twitter plans to add moderators from other regions soon.

A few weeks ago, Community Notes received an update that the company claims will help to identify more “low quality” fact checks. As a result, more of the contributors who write these unhelpful annotations will lose their writing ability, Twitter said, requiring those users to earn back their “contributor” status. The algorithm change involves scoring notes where contributors explain why a tweet shouldn’t be deemed misleading.


It seems Twitter is moving more and more away from in-house content moderation to automated and now community based. This has a lot to do with Twitter losing so many employees in the last couple months. Community Notes being a somewhat ‘human based’ type of content moderation system is good and bad. While you do have the human element evaluating content, there is still the protentional for abuse or bias. Though, this is still better than trying to rely on AI algorithms alone.

via Tech Crunch