There are a lot of questions about how Elon Musk’s plans for a ‘Twitter 2.0’ will actually play out, with questions of uncertainty looming around every corner. Apparently, another key element to this has something to do with Twitter vastly improving accessibility to its ‘Community Notes’, opening it up to all users globally. Well, yes and no – as of today, all Twitter users can view Community Notes attached to Tweets, but only US users can create them. However, Twitter says that more contributors from other regions will soon be able to add notes to Tweets.
“People everywhere can now see and rate notes, helping to ensure notes are helpful to those from a wide range of views. You can see notes that are currently rated helpful and showing on Twitter here. If you don’t see them yet, don’t fret, it’s in the process of rolling out.”
Global Notes
Twitter originally launched Community Notes as ‘Birdwatch’ last January as a means to expand its efforts to combat misinformation in Tweets. As seen in this example, through Community Notes, contributors, who are approved users within the Twitter community, can add contextual notes to Tweets that may contain potentially misleading info. Tweets with these notes then show up with an in-stream indicator, alerting users to the additional info.
So, does that make it a bit clearer why they chose the name ‘Community Notes’? The idea is that by leaving it to the Twitter community to provide notes on Tweets, that’ll enable Twitter to take a more hands-off approach to moderation because it won’t be Twitter’s own team that needs to dictate the rules; ‘the people’ will get to decide on what is and isn’t acceptable, essentially through crowdsourcing.
New Chief Twit Elon Musk seems to think that this is the best way forward for the app. Musk says that Community Notes ‘will have a powerful impact on falsehoods’ within the app because it would enable a broad range of inputs to rate the accuracy and truth of statements made within Tweets. Musk apparently decided to go in this direction because he believes that the political bias that now pollutes Twitter’s channels is one major thing that’s holding it back.
Now, with way more contributors and notes flowing in, Twitter users will finally have their say, with those who are participants of the same discussion also forming said discussion’s arbitration court, making Community Notes a better representation of community acceptance and sentiment. In many ways, it kind of reminds us of Reddit’s up and downvotes, with the community essentially able to dictate how posts are displayed in the app simply through majority votation. Community Notes differs in that it would also include contextual notes and won’t impact the display of Tweets in the same way. By letting users add notes and vote on the accuracy of amendments, that should help provide valuable pointers on divisive comments, which could help facilitate more context and understanding.
The Wrap
There’s also the risk that the tool will be used to highlight partisan views and bury opposing perspectives, with loads of activists and social justice warriors potentially dogpiling and downvoting opinions they don’t agree with. Either way, there’s a certain level of risk associated with crowdsourcing truth, potentially amplifying or validating what people believe or would want to be true. So while it does add another dynamic to validating information that circulates in the app, it’s not a complete or total solution just yet.
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