Twitter is rolling out Community Notes globally

Twitter is rolling out Community Notes to its users globally. The company recently announced that the feature will be visible to everyone around the world in the coming days. It is currently only available to users in the US. New owner Elon Musk sees Community Notes as a critical element of the social network’s misinformation policy.

Twitter launches Community Notes globally

Originally called Birdwatch, Twitter launched this feature in January last year as a crowdsourced moderation and fact-checking tool. It lets selected users flag misleading tweets and add notes to such tweets providing informative context. Other users can then rate those notes to tell whether they found the context helpful. Twitter says it will only show notes rated helpful by people from diverse perspectives. This is to avoid “one-sided ratings”.

Musk renamed Birdwatch to Community Notes last month, just days after taking over the company in late October. He called the feature an “absolute game-changer” for fighting misinformation on Twitter at scale. The Twitter CEO said Community Notes has “incredible potential for improving information accuracy” on the platform. But for that to happen, the tool must be available to users with diverse viewpoints all around the world. The global rollout has now begun.

Twitter is already leaning heavily toward automated detection to combat misinformation and other hateful content on the platform. The company says its trust and safety team is still well-resourced but machines will still replace several manual reviews and interventions in its moderation process. This will speed up the removal or de-amplification of potentially harmful content on the platform. However, as the company itself noted, some benign uses of abuse-prone terms may also get affected. Maybe Twitter is hoping Community Notes to help in such situations.

This global rollout of Community Notes comes around the same time Twitter relaunches its revamped Twitter Blue service. The social network biggie suspended the subscription service last month after a mass impersonation. It is selling the coveted certification checkmark, aka blue tick, with Blue. People exploited it to create seemingly verified fake accounts of prominent personalities and mislead unsuspecting users. Chaos ensued, forcing Twitter to suspend the service.

A month later, Twitter relaunched Blue on Monday with some measures in place to prevent a repeat of last month’s chaos. Most notably, it will only give the checkmark to accounts that verify their identity. The checkmark will also be temporarily disabled if the user changes their handle, user name, or profile picture.