Elon Musk to rebrand Twitter's Birdwatch program under new name
Elon Musk says Twitter program has potential for 'improving information accuracy'
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Elon Musk said Saturday that Twitter's pilot program Birdwatch would be renamed.
"Birdwatch (soon to be renamed Community Notes) has incredible potential for improving information accuracy on Twitter!" the billionaire tweeted in response to a tweet from Twitter's Product VP Keith Coleman that highlighted reporting from MediaWise's Alex Mahadevan.
Mahadevan wrote that the use of Birdwatch since Musk took over the social media company had "exploded," jumping from under 50 notes each day to over 130.
He said the ratings across the program's notes had quadrupled, though noting that the number of "helpful" notes "seems" to be handled by the algorithm.
This illustration photo taken May 13, 2022, displays Elon Musk's Twitter account with a Twitter logo in the background in Los Angeles. (Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images / Getty Images)
Musk's tweet now has more than 12,000 likes. He previously wrote that the community notes feature is "awesome."
"Our goal is to make Twitter the most accurate source of information on Earth, without regard to political affiliation," Musk tweeted last week.
Birdwatch was launched last year — on a separate site — and introduced by Coleman as a "community-based approach to misinformation."
"We believe regular people can valuably contribute to identifying and adding helpful context to potentially misleading information. Many of the internet’s existing collaborative sites thrive with the help of non-expert contributions — Wikipedia, for example — and, while it’s not a cure-all, research has shown the potential of incorporating crowdsourced based approaches as part of a broader toolkit to address misleading information on the internet …" Twitter said.
SpaceX owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk smiles at the E3 gaming convention in Los Angeles June 13, 2019. (REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo / Reuters Photos)
It allowed enrolled users to identify information in tweets that they believe is misleading and provide notes with informative context.
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To identify notes that are "helpful," Birdwatch ratings requires an agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in past ratings, in an effort to prevent one-sided ratings.
Twitter does not write, rate or moderate notes, unless they break Twitter's rules.
Exterior view of the Twitter offices April 26, 2022, in New York City. (Kena Betancur/VIEW press / Getty Images)
Notes can be reported to prevent abuse.
However, not all users believe Birdwatch can avoid bias or pile-ons.
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Birdwatch was made available to a test group of people in the U.S. who would see the highest-rated Birdwatch notes.
Since then, several updates to the program have been made.