Birdwatch is a new program launched by Twitter to combat misinformation on the platform, using volunteers to help determine the reliability of content. According to Twitter, Birdwatch invites selected users “to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading and write notes that provide informative context.” Eventually, Twitter plans to attach curated versions of these notes directly to tweets.
This strategy — known as crowdsourced moderation — places some of the onus of dealing with misinformation on the users of a platform. Researchers have in the past advocated for crowdsourced methods in part because the sheer scale of misinformation far exceeds the capacity of dedicated content moderators and fact checkers. MIT researchers studying crowdsourced fact checking suggested in an October 2020 preprint that the practice could protect against accusations of bias often lobbed at the fact checking industry (although this hasn’t been empirically tested).
[…]
Source: What is Birdwatch? | First Draft