Twitter Intros "Birdwatch" Community-Driven Approach to Misinformation

[engine]

Twitter is introducing "Birdwatch", a pilot program in the U.S. which is a community-based approach to help address the spread of misinformation.

Birdwatch will allow users to write notes in tweets to provide context to what they believe is misleading content.

At present, for this pilot program, it's only going to be visible on the Birdwatch site [birdwatch.twitter.com...]

We hope this will enable experts, researchers, and the public to analyze or audit Birdwatch, identifying opportunities or flaws that can help us more quickly build an effective community-driven solution.

We know there are a number of challenges toward building a community-driven system like this — from making it resistant to manipulation attempts to ensuring it isn’t dominated by a simple majority or biased based on its distribution of contributors. We’ll be focused on these things throughout the pilot.

[blog.twitter.com...]

[lammert]

Despite the good intentions of Twitter, I am afraid that this will just provide another vector for scammers and con-artists to bring their distorted world view to the masses. How will they check that birdwatcher-participants are genuine knowledgeable non-biased members while they can't assure the same on their general tweets platform?

[engine]

Anyone contributing will not be anonymous, as far as their twitter nic is concerned, and I guess this pilot program will show how this could be gamed, but, yes, it may not be suitable for mainstream.
It also wont be on the twitter timeline while under test.