Fake news and misinformation is a huge problem as some people do not necessarily bother reading or putting in the extra effort in researching before they share an article. This means that even if the person did not have the intention to spread fake news, it still happens all the same, and this is an issue that social media platforms have been trying to fix.Twitter has since announced their latest efforts in a new platform called Birdwatch. Instead of relying on Twitter’s own moderators or algorithms to flag down fake news, Birdwatch will turn to the public to try and attempt crowdsourcing the efforts in trying to spot posts that might be misleading or outright fake.
According to Twitter, “Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets 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. Eventually we aim to make notes visible directly on Tweets for the global Twitter audience, when there is consensus from a broad and diverse set of contributors.”
Twitter acknowledges that there could be problems from the get-go, where it might be messy as people might accidentally (or purposely) try to flag legitimate articles as fake, but the company thinks that it’s still worth trying and to see if maybe they can come up with something that will work. For those interested, you can head on over to the Birdwatch page for more information.
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