Beginning today, Community Notes are visible around the world 🌎🌍🌏
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: twitter.com/i/communitynot… If you don’t see them yet, don’t fret, it’s in the process of rolling out.
People around the world who want to have additional impact—including writing notes—can now sign up at twitter.com/i/flow/join-bi… As there are important nuances in each market, we’ll expand the contributor base country-by-country. We’ll add contributors from a first new country soon.
If you’re new to Community Notes, take a look at how this open source system — powered by the people, for the people — adds helpful and informative context to Tweets: twitter.github.io/communitynotes/
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Exciting update to our open source ranking algorithm that improves note quality, making it less likely that mediocre or unhelpful notes appear on Tweets. In the spirit of #AlgorithmicTransparency, here’s how and why it works…
Some notes appear on Tweets, then later disappear. As more ratings come in, they lose their Helpful status. This kind of self-correction is a good thing, but we consider these “false positives” — not necessarily bad notes, but ultimately not broadly helpful enough to show.
Analyzing data over the past few months, we’ve found that rating tags (for example, "sources not included") can be powerful signals to identify false positive notes early in the rating process.
Birdwatch is now Community Notes. We’ve seen our contributors trying to explain what Birdwatch is, and we think a simpler, more intuitive name will help understanding. Hence Community Notes. It’s… what it is.
This isn’t just a random new name. It’s actually Birdwatch’s very first name. Before there was a Birdwatch, before there was anyone building this thing, there was a design mockup envisioning the idea, and you know what it was called?
In the spirit of transparency, Birdwatch makes everything and the kitchen sink public and open source. Today, we’re sharing a paper that details the research, analysis and outcomes that informed its development and helped us understand its performance. 📊 github.com/twitter/birdwa…
Birdwatch seeks to provide context that will be informative and helpful to a wide range of people. It does this using a bridging-based ranking system — different from typical engagement-based approaches — which we have made open source.
This paper dives deep into the Birdwatch algorithm, the research methods used to evaluate its effect on core metrics — informing understanding, informing sharing behavior, and perceived helpfulness — and what we learned from the analysis.
Buckle up! We have a handful of exciting new updates to share with y’all:
- Research on the impact Birdwatch is having
- A new system to keep contribution quality high
- Enrolling more contributors
- Expanding the visibility of notes on Twitter blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/p…
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Our research shows that people who see a Tweet with a Helpful Birdwatch note are, on average, 15-35% less likely to Like/Retweet it. And, on average, people from across the political spectrum are 20-40% less likely to agree with a misleading Tweet after reading a note on it.
These results indicate that Birdwatch notes help people make more informed decisions about what they share on Twitter and we can't wait to bring this value to everyone! But before that can happen, we need to ensure that the quality of notes remains high, at scale.