Twitter Launches 'Birdwatch,' a Forum To Combat Misinformation (nbcnews.com) 145
Twitter unveiled a feature Monday meant to bolster its efforts to combat misinformation and disinformation by tapping users in a fashion similar to Wikipedia to flag potentially misleading tweets. From a report: The new system allows users to discuss and provide context to tweets they believe are misleading or false. The project, titled Birdwatch, is a standalone section of Twitter that will at first only be available to a small set of users, largely on a first-come, first-served basis. Priority will not be provided to high-profile people or traditional fact-checkers, but users will have to use an account tied to a real phone number and email address.
"Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading or false, and write notes that provide informative context," Twitter Vice President of Product Keith Coleman wrote in a press release. "We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable." While Birdwatch will initially be cordoned off to a separate section of Twitter, the company said "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."
"Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading or false, and write notes that provide informative context," Twitter Vice President of Product Keith Coleman wrote in a press release. "We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable." While Birdwatch will initially be cordoned off to a separate section of Twitter, the company said "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."
Provide informative context? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The phrase "polishing a turd" comes to mind.
Re:Provide informative context? (Score:4, Funny)
The phrase "polishing a turd" comes to mind.
You might want to talk with The Mythbusters [slate.com] about that ...
The Internet was designed to solve that (Score:2)
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If you have something to say that can be said in 280 characters, you have nothing to say.
Hallmark is holding on line 3 ...
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I picked it up, but they didn't have anything to say.
Well this is only about 6 or so years too late (Score:1)
Twitter got rich in being a peddler of lies. Now they want to act like they've got nothing to do with it. It's a little late guys.
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and who will censor them? And....you see where this is going.
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And who will stand up for the man who speaks objective facts as everyone screams at him because the objective scientifically-proven peer-reviewed easily-checked indisputable facts hurt a fragile SJWs fee-fees?
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Well I'm going to call your employer and tell him you have problematic opinions shitlord!
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Turns out your employer told me to pound sand, so I went on facebook and found your family's personal info and posted it all over the internet to intimidate you into silence*.
*For legal reasons this entire thing is a joke, but this is legitimately how these fuckstains think
Re: Well this is only about 6 or so years too late (Score:1, Offtopic)
They still do not care.
They only care about others taking over control and killing the bird with one stone.
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I'm curious as to what lies twitter has been peddling.
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That situation arose because the courts decided that Trump's account was official government communications. Remember he lost a court case over being able to block people?
Snopes (Score:2, Insightful)
Because that worked so well for notoriously biased and political Snopes.com.
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People who hate Snopes are far-right wingnuts who have a disagreement with what the rest of us would call established facts, every single time, and their best evidence of Snopes' supposed major bias is some minor nitpicking. Prove me wrong.
Re:Snopes (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Snopes (Score:4, Informative)
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An ex QAnon believer said something very insightful the other day. It feels good because it feels rational. Like discovering some hidden truth that makes you smarter than average.
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Re:Snopes (Score:4, Interesting)
That's been my experience with Snopes as well. It's truthful and has low bias.
The people I encountered who disliked it referred to other sources like "The Epoch Times", "Newsmax", "AON", "Brietbart", "Fox News-Hannity" as trustworthy and unbiased.
Fox News isn't bad for actual news with news anchors. But the fox opinion shows are actively dishonest and massively biassed- often contradicting reality or behaving in a blatantly hypocritical way.
I'll continue to trust Snopes until I find evidence to the contrary.
I also like the BBC and the Economist for low bias, honest reporting.
Watch out for "Allsides." They are trying to slip in as a bias validation site. So far seem accurate but I'm very suspicious of them.
Media matters bias check is having some sketchy ads lately.
MSNBC is supposedly left bias but they sneak in a lot of pro-wealthy propaganda when you pay attention. As when anchors literally said "we can't cut taxes on the job creators". The fact is- wealthy people mostly invest their money overseas and don't create jobs here. Corporations are efficiency engines that destroy jobs.
If you want jobs- you want small businesses. Easiest way to help small business creation is national health care.
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There are degrees of bias.
lies by commission
lies by omission
no verifiable lies- when found to be untrue- retracted.
Then there's
slanted subject selection
slanted word selection - esp emotionally weighted word choices.
mildly slanted subject or word selection
No discernable slant to subjects or word selection.
In my experience for the last decade or so Snopes:
covers every question I've looked for (so no omissions)
accurately states the issue- often with a quote
has told no verifiable lies. (and no- quoting a source
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So snopes says something is likely true because the BBC says so? There would be the bulk of the bias.The other elements are merely tweaks to push people more into a certain direction.
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Yes I have used snopes and it is fine but beyond a certain level it will break down.I do not trust it when it gets into controversial issues because that is where the weight of trustworthy sources grows. We always rely on trust. It is impossible to avoid it but with a lot of work we can shift the balance a bit.
For instance, picking a random controversial subject (really, I just looked it up): https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch... [snopes.com]
Now this is my source:
https://thepoliticalinsider.co... [thepoliticalinsider.com]
Hersh says Rich communicate
I'm a lefty and I've had my beefs with Snopes (Score:2)
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/apr/29/the-unreliable-facts-of-a-fact-checking-site/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4730092/Snopes-brink-founder-accused-fraud-lying.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4042194/Facebook-fact-checker-arbitrate-fake-news-accused-defrauding-website-pay-prostitutes-staff-includes-escort-porn-star-Vice-Vixen-domme.html
https://newspunch.com/snopes-lying-pedophile-democrat/
https://www.forbes
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A bunch of sketchy blogs, tabloid rags and right-wing nutjob sites nitpicking and attacking the messenger, sounds about right.
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Forbes? Washington Times? Bullshit.
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Washington times is a tabloid rag, Forbes is a sketchy blog - don't be fooled by the name, anyone can write on there, just like Wordpress or Medium.
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I did not know this https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab... [duckduckgo.com] but it does look like Forbes and quite a few others have created contributor programs to bulk up their online content. At least the link above does tag the article author as a contributor which should help some.
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Yeah it's unfortunate the decent sources never post the harebrained nonsense that supports right-wing nutjobbery...that's the problem with decent sources, all working in cahoots with each other to keep lies and nonsense out.
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Oh puhlease, Snopes is legitimate. But truth sometimes disagrees with your politics. It has taken more of a political bent lately, but mostly because there were just so many myths and lies coming out of the political arena. They do the research and provide the links, which is infinitely more than what happens with political lies.
Re:Snopes (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno, it was notoriously reliable for decades, one of the jewels of the early internet all the way back to the days of Netscape Navigator. Strange, and entirely coincidental I'm sure, that shitting on Snopes was a pastime that spontaneously emerged in 2016. "Political"? I suppose, to the extent that objective reality is a hindrance to certain politicians.
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The topic of late has of course been a lot on the various deplatforming actions agai
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How can something that cites numerous sources be biased?
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Do you mean sources other than Fox or NewsMax?
I'm sure this will work out exactly as intended (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm completely convinced that this won't possibly be turned into some kind of miniature Ministry of Truth.
Me, too. It will never be miniature.
I mean how are the ever going to have a " consensus from a broad and diverse set of contributors" when they have chased off anyone that disagrees with them?
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Report to who, Twitter? They can report all they want. Twitter has no authority over me, and it has nothing I need.
Iron Curtain? It feels more like a dollar store shower curtain.
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Why care about freedom of speech if you have nothing to say.
Wake me when we start reporting to the (Score:2)
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Not calling out bullshit is a far more dangerous path to go down.
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Reporting crimes to the police? You're aware that people have been doing that in every country for as long as police have existed?
That makes two of us (Score:2)
br. OTOH Twitter has that sweet, sweet audience that all the political kiddies love and covet.
Do you Gamble? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do you Gamble? Socialist Edition (Score:2)
I am putting money on this: By any metric - science, economics, history, experience - Socialism leads to worse societal and national outcomes than a free enterprise system. Anyone who espouses Socialism is promoting fake news and demonstrably dangerous ideas. So dangerous, they should be stamped out as the equivalent of "Fire!" in a theater, or "Be there, will be wild!â
And please, don't try calling it social democracy.
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I wonder if they will ban the fact that Socialism has killed more people then every war in the history of mankind combined.
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How do you square this with the various European countries producing better outcomes for their citizens with "socialism/social democracy?" Is that Not True Socialism?
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Easy. They have freer markets than, for example, the USA.
Read Philippon's "The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets".
Of course, there are no such things as purely free markets or pure socialism, just degrees of each. But the greater the tendency to freedom, the greater the prosperity.
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This guy seems to have a very different definition of a free market, and I like it! :-)
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I'll leave you with this quote from P.J. O'Rourke:
"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."
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How do you square this with the various European countries producing better outcomes for their citizens with "socialism/social democracy?" Is that Not True Socialism?
Most European nations are not meeting their defense spending obligations to NATO, they under-fund defense. That gives them a lot of resources to allocate for other things. If there is a conflict that may not work out so well.
The current system is most likely unsustainable due to demographics.
European Demographics and Migration [hoover.org]
Could Demographic Trends Cripple Europe by 2050? [huffpost.com]
I'll take that Gamble (Score:2)
So adding 1 more way to do false reports hardly matters.
Great Name !!! (Score:2)
bird brains use birdwatch to confirm or deny the sky is falling.
Even Newton's 3 Laws take more than 240 characters.
Twitter is sound bites like a bird song, If you aren't one of those species of bird, the song is wrong.
Have to build a web of trust (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically let people mark items as good or bad and then validate what they say by hand at first.
If they look accurate, then use automation to identify people who mark things similar to that core trusted group.
Every year, manually revalidate a sample for trustworthiness.
It's sort of like what Slashdot does with the meta moderation.
Slashdot has slid less than some other forums I use.
Re: Have to build a web of trust (Score:2)
The problem then will be, that there will be conflicting groups. And you might be excused to think that one could check and find the true one then. But reality, is sadly, relative. So even if we didn't usually have a massive lack of information, ... different things can *both* be true at the same time for different people.
A famous example would be "Which of two events came first?" under relativistic motion. (Note that magnetism is an effect of electrostatic force under relativistic motion. So a common every
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Obviously the good enough always happens to be what defenders of censorship are working on, which makes this guideline pretty much useless.
The whole drive to increase censorship is motivated by a desire to control narratives , whether it be for legitimate reasons, pure power reasons or any combination of that. Democrats want to control the narrative at the expense of Republicans. US wants to control the narrative at the expense of its opponents. Mainstream media wants
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What you described is a consensus-building mechanism, not truth discovering mechanism.
Put your proposed system to the hypothetical test - how would it handle Galileo when all individuals considered trustworthy are from the Church?
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Who the fuck cares. Your feedback is not required. Your rating is not required.
Read or don't read the article. Agree or disagree with the article. Not sure if it is accurate - DO SOME FUCKING RESEARCH. The internet is not the Encyclopedia Britannica - DO NO BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ ONLINE.
Jesus people develop some critical thinking skills
I'm launching Birdwatchwatch. (Score:2)
Its main goal is to watch out for people utterly incompetent in basic philosophy, neuro-psychology and physics, who want to tell others what's real and what not.
Unfortunately, without Birdwatchwatchwatch, we'll never know if we are competent at judging other people's competence. And we found them to be incompetent. So we're stuck.
Birdwatchwatchwatchwatch is supposed to save us all, but its own principles forbid its own existence.
---- Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week! Try the veal!
---- This comment wa
"write notes that provide informative context" (Score:2)
Huh what? If they want to allow informative context, just lift the message size restriction. Or are the "notes" also limited to 280 characters?
The whole point of twitter is out-of-context snide remarks. Ideally things that can be interpreted in more than one way, for maximum outrage. Even the CEO of Twitter is forced to use a picture of a text page when he wants to post a slightly longer message.
Protocols Not Platforms (Score:2)
https://knightcolumbia.org/con... [knightcolumbia.org]
There are only two things that need to be done in a level 0 distributed social network: create a sharable key, process a handshake to create a permanent key-pair.
I log into my server and submit information. You log into your information and submit information. And the key-pair (along with what SSL secured domain it belongs to) grants access to pull information from one server to the other to display it to the user.
Level 1 gives you posts and comments (and optionally perman
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There has to be somewhere that "user friendly" gets added
FACT1: Sexism is not the reason for men doing STEM (Score:2)
FACT: Men and women are different and like doing different things.
THAT is why there are more men in STEM and more women in Healthcare.
So stop the discrimination in education and employment, you horrible, sexist manhaters.
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No men an women are the same, can't you see?
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That's the "fact" the fem1naz1s will put up on Bird (sic) Watch.
Or rather: Men and women are the same, except women have to be given preference for all jobs because .
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FACT: Men and women are different and like doing different things.
Actual Fact: Men and women have statistical differences in what they like to do, but there is significant overlap.
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"Actual Fact: Men and women have statistical differences in what they like to do, but there is significant overlap."
In other words, "men and women are different and like doing different things".
Go pick the nits off your scabby arse instead.
let me correct that (Score:1)
Easier solution and it has several benefits (Score:2)
Stop it and just ban them (Score:1)
Birdwatch, huh? (Score:2)
Isn't that a bit too..., how shall I say, on the beak?
New feature idea ... (Score:2)
Next Twitter should start "Bird Feeder" where people can *only* post misinformation -- so it can be consolidated and more easily mocked -- I mean -- debunked.
Do people really not know whales are robots? (Score:2)
Think about it people, obviously no real animal can get to be the size of a whale. They are obviously disguised submarines. The videos you see of whales jumping are to get a better vantage point of the surroundings, what other purpose would that serve?
I encourage everyone posting that whales are animals to use this new Twitter feature to report the notion that whales re not robots, as being unverified and questionable.
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Oh yeah, those "whales" were brought here by the lizard people.
Provide better education for all (Score:5, Insightful)
Misinformation is not a cause, it's a symptom of a lack of education. People want to believe and learn. Not everyone finds school easy. Some find it important to make money early in life due to their circumstances, and so they feed their curiosity and need for learning with whatever they find later in life. To combat misinformation does one need to start at providing better, free and accessible education for all. A better welfare and healthcare system, and a minimum wage further help to keep people interested in education.
Enabling people to learn as much as they like early in life goes a long way at combating misinformation. Exploitation of lower classes by elites for being dumb and by keeping them dumb, because of the power that comes with knowledge, can only plant the seeds for a revolution. Wanting to patch the problem of misinformation by chasing after the symptoms will at best delay it. To feed people intentionally with misinformation and then watch riots grow makes a mockery of society and its lack of education.
Corporations shouldn't play the role of a substitute teacher. They've already become a substitute for the press, which gets undermined by politics and no longer is a free press. Instead, when one sees value in separating the powers of a government into branches, then one should see the same value in separating other powers and not leave it to corporations to incorporate them all. People deserve education as much as they deserve protection, rights, justice and a vote.
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Education isn't a complete fix. Look at brexit, plenty of educated people supported that. Either they were mislead anyway or knew it was going to be a disaster but wanted it to happen anyway (usually for personal gain).
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Education isn't a complete fix. Look at brexit, plenty of educated people supported that. Either they were mislead anyway or knew it was going to be a disaster but wanted it to happen anyway (usually for personal gain).
What you have is an opinion. A lack of open-mindedness, lack of self-criticism and a belief in one's infallibility is not the result of a good education. So were many arguments for staying in the EU selfish, like import- and export gains, economic power, hiring of skilled workers or cheaper travel. These arguments were targeting people's greed and were meant to use their greed in order to drive them towards staying in the EU. Many educated people I know don't like it when you appeal at their greed. They wil
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To combat misinformation does one need to start at providing better, free and accessible education for all.
They had something fairly close to that in the 20th century before austerity became gospel. Since then funding for education went down so not surprising more people going to other sources for "education."
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While on the surface this sounds plausible, it does not actually work. At least all attempts so far have failed. The problem is not that people are unable to do fact-checking, the problem is that they are unwilling to do it. No amount of education can fix that.
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No, you cannot fix the exploitation of uneducated people as it's just one of the symptoms. As long as it presents an opportunity for others will it continue. Only providing more and better education allows more people to escape the exploitation. In a system where on one side you have people who need to take on multiple jobs only to cover living costs, while on the other side you have rich families, who can easily pay for a higher education of three children, then you obviously don't provide education for al
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Well, yes and no. Exploitation in the sense that they cannot get better jobs, yes. Education will fix that. But resilience against misinformation? I do not think so.
That is not to say I am against education. It has numerous benefits and we should give everybody the best education we and they can manage. I just do not think it will fix the misinformation problem.
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But resilience against misinformation? I do not think so.
Well, I have an education. It has trained me not ever to accept the lack of proof as the proof, but that a lack of proof can at best only serve as proof of the opposite. A proof needs to satisfy and be plausible, but not in the way that it fits a believe or an opinion. It needs to satisfy the requirement that after disproving all other possibilities it remains as being the only plausible proof.
So when I see QAnon claim the world is run by a cabal of evil paedophiles who inject dead babies am I simply blown
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I do not dispute that. But what I observe here (Europe) that a lot of the people falling for misinformation actually have "good" education. Sure, no education makes you a more vulnerable to misinformation, but there is a pretty large group of people where education does nothing to make them less vulnerable at least to some types of misinformation that are currently a real problem.
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Horseshit. Plenty of well educated people fall prey to misinformation.
Horseshit, I mean - your bias is showing. People all up and down the economic ladder both resist and fall prey to misinformation.
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When one can show an information is wrong, but people accept it as true anyway, then it's not necessarily the failure of their education. It can still mean they had no or only a bad education, they can have forgotten about it, they've become lazy or have other motives. It doesn't mean they never had a chance to resist misinformation. And no, I didn't see anyone asking corporations to become substitute teachers either, and yet is Twitter offering to help.
Re: Provide better education for all (Score:2)
A contributing factor in the last decade is the total erosion of trust towards any official institution. With very good reason. Everyone is a spin doctor, propagandist and a liar. Politicians, businessman, religious professionals, judges, academics, journalists, scientists, technocrats, Slashdot....we politicised and polarised everything.
Now, some people, can call the lies of the institutions without turning for truth and explanations to fake news and conspiracies. But many people will.
Furthermore, the hyst
s230 compliance (Score:2)
Clever.
This means they get to treat their warning labels as user content (instead of their own speech) so thereby retaining s230 protection for them - even if the warning labels are heavily curated to still push the viewpoint of Twitter management
I'm not a fan of this kind of hack as it'll just keep pushing the same tired one sided garbage without any kind of responsibility on Twitter's part, but someone decided it was a good idea to give companies both rights and legal immunity so... this is what happens.
What could possibly go wrong (Score:2)
You are allowed to write notes on a tweet? (Score:2)
Re: Charming the Twitter Stasi Youth (Score:2)
You mean the Gestapo. Stasi was east-German. ;)
Not quite the same but enough that I'll allow it.
Hiter Youth SS was the worst though. Grandma said they really weren't humans anymore. (She meant their behavior was entirely unnatural.)
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Hiter Youth SS was the worst though. Grandma said they really weren't humans anymore. (She meant their behavior was entirely unnatural.)
There was some discussion about SS training in the last few years in Germany. It was completely aimed at eradicating any individuality or individual will.
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