Twitter Partners Up With Reuters and AP to Combat Misinformation on the Platform by Adding Context to Tweets

Twitter announced that it would team up with Reuters and The Associated Press (AP) to fight the spread of misinformation on the platform.

Twitter wants to focus on adding more context to the news and trends that circulate on the app. Reuters and AP will aid Twitter's use of public service announcements, especially during high-visibility events.

Twitter Partners Up with Reuters and AP

The social media company's Curation team is currently working on adding more information to content that includes news and top trends on the app's Explore section.

The Curation team also assesses how the results are ranked to ensure that content from reliable sources is at the top of the search results when users type in keywords or hashtags, according to The Verge.

Also, the team is involved with the prompts that appear on the Explore page on the app's Home Timeline related to major events such as emergencies, the pandemic, entertainment, and politics.

They help with the misinformation labels that show up on tweets that are posted on Twitter but are tagged with context from authoritative sources.

However, the Curation team is separate from the app's Trust and Safety team. The Trust and Safety team determines when tweets violate the guidelines, and they are responsible for removing the tweets or banning the account.

Twitter confirmed that both Reuters and AP would not be involved in these decisions.

The social media company stated that by working with the two news organizations, they could increase the speed of adding more information to tweets on the platform.

This means that when there is news trending on the app with a confusing context, Twitter's team will turn to the two news organizations to improve the information added to the conversations on the platform, according to Reuters.

In this way, the social media company can immediately stop misinformation from going viral. The users will no longer have to wait for other trusted sources to chime in to correct the misleading tweets.

Twitter's Birdwatch System

Aside from the Curation team, Twitter's fact-checking system called Birdwatch will also leverage feedback from Reuters and AP to know if it can trust the information shared by users or not.

Twitter rolled out the pilot version of Birdwatch back in January. It was an effort to add context to tweets in real-time, according to Tech Crunch.

For years, Twitter has struggled with handling misinformation on its platform because of how fast-paced the sharing of real-time news is. High-profile figures also use the platform to manipulate the truth.

The social media company has experimented with numerous features to help stop the spread of misinformation.

Twitter had disabled one-click retweets during the election period in 2020, had added fact checks, and banned accounts that repeatedly violated their guidelines.

Birdwatch is the company's latest effort to add context to tweets and will also be utilized by Reuters and AP for fact-checking purposes.

The collaborations will focus on English-language content on the app, but Twitter stated that it would support more languages in the future.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Sophie Webster