Twitter is rife with fake news, false information, and good ol’ idiotic ignorance, but now it is looking to correct this flood of fakery with Birdwatch, a network of crowdsourced tweeters, who will add notes to factually incorrect tweets in an effort to provide correct information.
The pilot version of Birdwatch launched in January, and today it is starting to roll out across iOS, Android, and desktop.
“We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable” Product VP Keith Coleman wrote in a blog post.
“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.”
This decentralised approach may sound chaotic, but it works for Wikipedia, so I’ll reserve my judgement until it plays out.
