Twitter Expands its Fact-Checking Project Birdwatch

The popular social networking platform launched a project called Birdwatch last year that asked Twitter users to report misleading tweets and give remarks to provide information in an attempt to expose such content, which would then be appended to the original tweet.

Like other social media platforms, Twitter has long been under pressure to do more to prevent false and misleading content from spreading among its 217 million daily users.

Furthermore, the notes written by the 10,000 contributors in the Birdwatch pilot program have been kept on a separate website. Now, a number of random users on the platform in the United States will be able to see Birdwatch notes directly via tweets and can rate the helpfulness of the information.

We’ve been hard at work building a Birdwatch that people from different points of view find helpful. We’re seeing promising results, and starting today, a test group of people in the US will see the highest rated Birdwatch notes on Tweets. https://t.co/7fIJJmOfcl

— Community Notes (@CommunityNotes) March 3, 2022

The company further shared that it plans to expand the Birdwatch program to other countries as well. Additionally, some Birdwatch notes on Thursday addressed misleading content related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine last week.

A tweet on February 26th, which had been retweeted over 17,000 times, showcased an image of British rockstar Paul McCartney waiving a Ukrainian flag while on stage in front of a crowd.

A note appended to the said tweet on the Birdwatch site mentioned that the photo was taken back in 2008 when McCartney performed at an “Independence Concert” in Kyiv.

The company said that a survey revealed that people were 20% to 40% less likely to agree with the content of a potentially misleading tweet after reading a Birdwatch note about it, versus those who saw the content without the note.