- Elon Musk said Twitter’s Birdwatch feature will now be called “Community Notes.”
- The tool allows users to add context notes to potentially fraudulent posts and was made public last month.
- Musk tweeted that there is “tremendous potential to improve information accuracy” on the platform.
Elon Musk tweeted Saturday about an expansion of Twitter’s Birdwatch feature that he said has “tremendous potential for improving information accuracy” as the new CEO faces ongoing concerns over content inaccuracies and moderation on the platform of social media.
Birdwatch will allow users to add context to notes on potentially fraudulent posts. It will also be renamed “Community Notes,” and Musk tweeted that the tool has “tremendous potential to improve the accuracy of information” on the platform.
The billionaire made the comments in response to a I tweet from Twitter’s VP of Product, Keith Coleman, who commented on “increased usage of Birdwatch over the past week”.
Coleman’s tweet included a yarn written by Alex Mahadevan, director of Mediawise, citing publicly available data showing that the number of Birdwatch notes had increased to 131 a day, up from 45 a day earlier, in the five days since Musk bought Twitter.
Birdwatch notes were first made public to users in early October, after the feature launched in a pilot program in the US in January 2021. According to a blog post written by Coleman on the Twitter website, the feature “allows people to identify information in the Tweet they believe is misleading and write notes that provide informative context.”
“We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable,” Coleman wrote.
Among the tweets where Birdwatch notes have appeared in the past week is one post from Musk himself. He claimed “Twitter has seen a massive drop in revenue due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, although nothing has changed with content moderation.”
He continued: “Extremely messed up! They are trying to destroy free speech in America.”
A Birdwatch note currently attached to that tweet says, “Many advertisers have confirmed they’re pausing spending as they see what direction Elon Musk takes with the platform,” and links to a Guardian article about General Mills temporarily pulling ads.
The increase comes after hundreds of employees were reportedly shut out of Twitter’s content moderation system last week, leaving only 15 employees with access to the program, Bloomberg reported.
Musk later promised civil rights leaders he would restore access to the content moderation system and told advertisers he was considering creating content moderation tiers similar to movie ratings, according to The Financial Times.
Originally, posts were only visible on a separate Birdwatch page, before being integrated into the platform. According to the company, “Birdwatch is made up of independent contributors and individual posts are never written by Twitter.”
“This is intentional, as it helps ensure that our efforts to address potentially misleading information are informed by a diverse group of people using our service,” the company wrote in October 2022 blog post.
Users can rate notes as “helpful” or “not helpful,” and notes are displayed publicly based on an algorithm that Twitter openly shared on GitHub.
