Twitter launches Birdwatch to combat fake news and misinformation

Twitter has launched its community-driven program called Birdwatch which allows users to fact-check the tweets and thereby helping them identify the misinformation in it, the company announced on Monday. The community-based pilot program which is now available for only a preselected group in the US will help users flag the misleading tweets and enable them to write notes providing contexts.

"We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable," Twitter said 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." The blog post added.

The program will start with 1,000 users which will then expand beyond the US.

In the first phase of the pilot, notes will be visible only on a separate Birdwatch site in which the participants can also rate the usefulness of the notes added by other contributors. Hence the notes will not be accessible to the public on Twitter.

"These notes are being intentionally kept separate from Twitter for now, while we build Birdwatch and gain confidence that it produces context people find helpful and appropriate," Twitter said in a statement late on Monday.

"We know there are a number of challenges toward building a community-driven system like this - from making it resistant to manipulation attempts to ensuring it isn't dominated by a simple majority or biased based on its distribution of contributors," said Keith Coleman, Twitter, Vice President of Product, in the blog post.

Twitter had recently found widespread misinformation and propaganda on its platform regarding the US election campaigns and results and has been ever since looking for plans to combat the issue. It then permanently terminated the account of Donald Trump and his allies citing further incitement of violence.