Twitter Fact-checking Project: How Elon Musk's Community Notes Feature Works

Amidst a confusing Twitter era full of parody accounts and misinformation, how does the Birdwatch program come into play?

Since Elon Musk's Twitter takeover, the app has been the subject of numerous controversies. One of the recently launched features, Twitter Blue, has instigated several fake tweets from verified accounts posing as different individuals, leading to the feature getting turned on and off, according to the Washington Post.

However, in a recent Tweet by Musk, the tech mogul acknowledged the app's developing feature Birdwatch, which has been renamed to Community Notes as of November.

The Community notes feature is backed by Musk, who has been vocal about his free-speech agenda on Twitter. Fittingly, the feature shifts the responsibility of establishing the truth to Twitter users in a community effort.

What is Twitter's Community Notes Program?

Social media users may have encountered some Tweets accompanied by a remark containing relevant information or added context that has been rated "Helpful." This feature is a result of the Community notes feature, which was formerly called Birdwatch and has been in development for over a year now, according to the Twitter blog.

Twitter's Community Notes feature enables participants on the social media platform to collaboratively add context to potentially misleading tweets. The feature is available to Twitter in the US as of right now. Most notes have supplementary sources that can be clicked on to learn more about a topic or conversation in depth.

Additionally, Twitter created a Birdwatch onboarding process where new contributors earn the right to write notes by consistently rating other contributors' notes and accurately identifying those that are 'Helpful' and 'Not Helpful' in order to maintain the quality of notes.

Twitter's 'Community Notes' Reports Positive Results

According to Wired, Twitter's Vice President of Product revealed that the usage of the Community Watch feature has recently spiked. However, the project is still in its early days, and the data is open source.

As of November 8, it has only seen 38,494 notes from 5,433 people, which is a small number to oversee a platform with more than 200 million users. Despite being a small feature, the program has a big impact. Some of the most well-liked tweets on the site, with millions of likes and thousands of retweets, are among those who receive notes to add context for the community.

The Community notes allow users to fact-check tweets from celebrities or government officials. Interestingly, the feature has recently done some good as the White House deleted a widely circulated tweet after a Community Watch note called out missing context.

Interested users can keep themselves up to date with the development of the Community notes feature by following the official @Birdwatch Twitter account or applying to become a contributor and help improve the community on the social media platform.

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Written by: Andi C.