11 ms·

Birdwatch, a community-based approach to misinformation

75 points by razin 6y ago

wtetzner 6y ago
> People come to Twitter to stay informed This seems to be the heart of the problem.
whymauri 6y ago
Reminds me of the Overwatch moderation system used by Valve to collect cheater data from human evaluators in Counter-Strike. Eventually, they leveraged that data to improve their automated cheat detection systems. [0] Although Twitter's problem is way harder, IMO. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc
- 5AMUR41 6y ago
  This was actually a genius system on Valve's part. I think what makes these two systems different are a few things: -Overwatch at least had some method of selecting people that "knew about the game." People that had never ranked competitively in CSGO couldn't make decisions if someone was cheating, whereas it seems that the hopes for this new Twitter feature will be that anyone can "fact-check" a tweet. Even if evidence is required, it is beyond easy to find secondary sources that skew facts or statistics into a different connotation. -Whether or not someone is cheating is pretty binary. They either are or they aren't. One of my biggest concerns for Birdwatch is that it was likely be used on tweets that aren't binary statements of "write/wrong" facts, and will likely be used in mass-reports of those of other political stances. That, or shitposting
username3 6y ago
We need to see when a someone on one side disagrees with their own side. Echo chambers drown the voice of dissenters. We need to see when one side ignores the other side. We need a list of unanswered questions to hold every side accountable.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  Every side? "The other side"? Like you're going to hold the Leninists accountable for their unanswered claims against the Breadtubers for today's Voash drama? Or intervene with a fact check when someone says the 8052 is UV reprogrammable when only the modern clones are? Or for when the guy who talks about Magic the Gathering and was in Mulan makes an offhand comment about the new Harry Potter series and literally everyone gets upset? How are you even dividing sides?
hanniabu 6y ago
Who fact-checks the fact-checkers?
- md_ 6y ago
  The point here seems not to have independent professional fact-checkers, but to crowd-source it. On the one hand, I certainly struggle to see how more crowds will improve upon what is fundamentally a problem with crowds to begin with. On the other, Wikipedia seems to work reasonably well--and purely as a result of the community mores, not due to any sophisticated moderation algorithm or ranking structure or similar. I'm not holding my breath, but it is interesting to see if a community-driven effort imbued with a Wikipedian-like spirit might succeed where more automated efforts have not.
  - briantakita 6y ago
    The underlying question is philosophical freedom vs authoritarianism. The same tactics can be utilized by different actors who have different worldviews. The Stasi utilized Crowdsourcing to enforce authoritarianism for example. One person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. One's misinformation is another's truth particularly when it comes to how information is interpreted & what is focused upon.
    - fellowniusmonk 6y ago
      Once a proposition is falsified a rational community would rejected it. Once your community or protocol "philosophically" rejects checksums it is only a matter of time before your system breaks catastrophically. This philosophical freedom vs authoritarianism thing you're proposing is a view that is incomplete and small to the point of being false. The actual underlying question is do you accept that grounded truth exists and are you willing to have a large and nuanced enough view to include all non false propositions and reject all false propositions.
    - md_ 6y ago
      Sure, and if you squint hard enough, there are similarities between having a warning label slapped on your Tweets and being thrown in a gulag for decades. But if you're squinting that hard, not a lot of light is getting through.
LargeWu 6y ago
Would be very interested to see how this addresses one of the primary underlying pathways of misinformation - confirmation bias. Many people believe information because it confirms their worldview; whether it's provably true or false is often irrelevant. In fact, I suspect that having a belief proved wrong often even reinforces that belief in some cases. How much does truth matter in a post-truth society?
- c22 6y ago
  I feel like we moved from pre-truth society to post-truth society alarmingly quickly. Perhaps we should dwell for longer in the age of truth.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- call_me_dana 6y ago
  Truth still exists whether it’s completely hidden. Truth still exists if bad actors have injected 10 other believable stories alongside it. Truth still exists even if every fact checker calls the claim false. People have spent enormous sums of money and time to hide the truth from the public. Just because every effort has been made to hide the truth, doesn’t diminish the fact that the truth matters. In my opinion, it’s just the opposite. It matters more than ever.
  - collyw 6y ago
    > Truth still exists whether it’s completely hidden That kind of depends if you are discussing something objective or not. Wikipedia seems to have developed a strong left wing bias on anything political these days. Articles without any kind of politics still seem to be pretty objective. Can there be a single truth in politics, where ideas are very subjective?
- tomjen3 6y ago
  Whether you believe in Covid or not if you inhale the virus you may develop the decease. If you don't believe in guns you may find some nasty people in your house who do, and you will not be able to defend yourself. The truth still reigns supreme, it is just that people sometimes suffer unnecessarily because they do not know what the truth is.
Pfhreak 6y ago
I'm curious what mechanisms will be in place, and how effective they will be, at preventing dogpiling on people using this system. As a specific example, as a nonbinary person, I'm constantly running into people online who tell me there are only two genders, or that singular they is some sort of new concept. My concern with a consensus system is that it will be used to shut down people like me (or trans folk, or socialists, etc. etc. etc.) How do you build a consensus system that protects minority persons and also weeds out misinformation? Edit: Downvotes for... being non-binary I guess?
- cwkoss 6y ago
  That's a great example of how this could go wrong. I hope the folks at Twitter are keeping examples like yours in mind as they develop this.
- collyw 6y ago
  I have never come across a gendered language with more than two genders. If you are referring to "gender identity", it would be a good idea to use that phrase rather than the ambiguity of "gender" which now means different things to different people.
  - Pfhreak 6y ago
    Gender identity is a different concept. It's an internal conception of what gender you are. Compare that to, for instance, gender presentation, which is an outward facing set of traits that correspond to which gender you are showing others. Gender, in the context of language referring to a person, has a fairly settled meaning.
    - collyw 6y ago
      As someone classed as middle aged, gender is a synonym for sex to me, as it had been for decades. If you want to introduce new concepts, it would be easier for everyone if you used new words instead of trying to take over existing words. https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/77468 https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/77468
neartheplain 6y ago
How will Twitter prevent the sort of organized brigading and domination of the always-online crowd which plagues such crowdsourced review programs?
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  This is the central question. If someone isn't asking, "What would a malicious user do with this system?" and inserting their favorite internet bogeymen as a thought experiment, they haven't finished their design. This is doubly true for safety systems. I don't see much of the press release focused on how abuse of the safety system will be avoided beyond, "We'll eventually let it be reviewed by outside parties."
  - ourlordcaffeine 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure this project will just turn into opposing groups marking anything they disagree with as disinformation, the bigger group succeeding in having control of the narrative. What's to stop a flood of Russian accounts gaining control of what's marked as disinformation?
- kyleblarson 6y ago
  They won't prevent it. This is clearly by design on Twitter's part given that the always-online bluecheck crowd leans so far left.
- manojlds 6y ago
  I liked some blockchain / crypto based ideas people were having - like you have to use crypto to even say something is fake or not. A journalist has to "pledge" crypto that a news is not fake and the smart contract releases the amount back based on certain evaluations like if the post was voted as fake or not etc. (I am sure as described there will be holes, but I like the direction it was heading.)
  - fwip 6y ago
    That just becomes "rich people decide."
salmonellaeater 6y ago
> As we develop algorithms that power Birdwatch — such as reputation and consensus systems Consensus is the enemy of understanding. For topics where there is conflicting or poor evidence or that bear on the culture war, I do not want people voting on what is the consensus truth. I want to see all the evidence. We have enough problems with researchers not publishing uncomfortable data; I don't want the little that exists flagged because it conflicts with the average Twitter user's sensibilities.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > Consensus is the enemy of understanding. For topics where there is conflicting or poor evidence or that bear on the culture war, I do not want people voting on what is the consensus truth. I want to see all the evidence. That's a nice sentiment in a vacuum, but we're not in a vacuum. It's sort of like focusing on getting every child a college education when you can't even manage to teach them all literacy yet. At the point, I feel like the priority needs to be around figuring out a way to defeat disinformation and misinformation to restore some kind of common ground understanding of the facts. The marketplace of ideas can't function if major factions reject truth-seeking in favor of blatant lies that are appealing for various other reasons (e.g. emotional satisfaction, ability to manipulate others, etc.).
  - offby37years 6y ago
    Groups search for consensus, individuals for truth. Without consensus groups fracture. Without truth we're destined for the next dark age.
  - nailer 6y ago
    No. Truth does not flow from consensus like a college degree follows from literacy.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    We can all agree that chocolate is the best form of ice cream. Those who would disagree are obviously trolls spreading disinformation. The marketplace of ice cream can't function if we have other flavors like pistachio or strawberry being labeled "best" instead of the only truely best ice cream. Obviously these strawberry promoters are just manipulating other gullible ice cream consumers for their own ends.
peanut_worm 6y ago
Totally thought this was related to the Backyard Bird Count this year lol
oh_sigh 6y ago
I suspect this will be minorly used for direct misinformation control("Donald Rumsfeld is not a lizard person"), but mostly used for narrative control("While this fact is true by itself, you need to look at the bigger context..."), and so will be entirely ineffective. People readily take up new information, but are very hesitant to change their internal narrative on a matter. Especially when they're being told by others what their narrative should be. Double especially if part of their narrative is that big tech/liberals/academia/coastal elites/etc are trying to feed you the Big Lie. Conservative misinformation is a big talking point for liberals, and maybe the big societal issue at the moment, but as a small scale test run, I'd love to see birdwatch try to correct the record for misinformation that is commonly believed in liberal circles: Anti-GMO, anti-vaxx, toxic whiteness, the extents of systemic racism in our society, some of the more dire prognostications of nuclear war and global warming.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
thimkerbell 6y ago
Muddying the discourse is next-generation trolling.
anewaccount2021 6y ago
This will be a kangaroo court used to blunt-force-trauma a select subset of strawmen and deplorables off of the service. In the end, does anyone really care if Twitter is "truthful"?
- 5AMUR41 6y ago
  > In the end, does anyone really care if Twitter is "truthful"? As it's becoming an ever-increasing method of communication between government officials and whatnot, I'd say some amount of "truthfulness" and "validity" is warranted. The other day a member of the US government (I think it was Ted Cruz? I can't find it at the moment) wrote a tweet that implied he thought the Paris Climate agreement only affected the citizens of Paris. Something as factually "write/wrong" as that should be able to be contested and held accountable to being "wrong" That being said, I agree with you that this will not be used as intended and will undoubtedly lead to more confusion and confirmation bias from all sides. Using crowd-sourced knowledge in this manner leads to the assumption that "what the majority thinks is right is factual," and I'm reminded it was once "fact" that the sun rotated around the Earth
call_me_dana 6y ago
On the surface, it sounds really nice. But anyone who’s paying attention in the fake news era has a general idea on what this will be used for. Any tweets questioning the official narrative will be roundly criticized and ridiculed. Instead of having to delve into a long reply thread to see debunkers make their case, there will be an easy to digest notice within grasp. Which is not necessarily a bad thing if it is used fairly and responsibly. But judging on Twitter’s past performance, it likely won’t be. Dissent will be publicly humiliated while pure disinformation from governments, think tanks, and corporations have no such objections. Any doubts to the accepted story will be pointed at one of the fact checker sites and further inquiries censored. In an honest world, this would be one giant step to finally getting at the truth. But this isn’t an honest world, is it?
- wtetzner 6y ago
  > In an honest world, this would be one giant step to finally getting at the truth. But this isn’t an honest world, is it? Not to mention that in an honest wold, why would you even need something like this? You don't need it in an honest world, and it will end up being worse than nothing in a dishonest world. It doesn't seem like a good idea in any scenario.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    > Not to mention that in an honest world, why would you even need something like this? The world is what we make it - we are the masters of our own destiny. This is literally true (subject to boundaries imposed on us by nature: the laws of physics, the physical resources available to us, the nature of the evolved human mind and the societies we have built for ourselves to operate in, and other things I may overlook). If a variable in the world is not to our liking, and it is fixable, we can choose to fix it (as a collective species), or not. Mother Nature imposes some restrictions on this, but not many. From the article: > To date, we have conducted more than 100 qualitative interviews with individuals across the political spectrum who use Twitter, and we received broad general support for Birdwatch. In particular, people valued notes being in the community’s voice (rather than that of Twitter or a central authority) and appreciated that notes provided useful context to help them better understand and evaluate a Tweet (rather than focusing on labeling content as “true” or “false”). Our goal(!) is to build Birdwatch in the open, and have it shaped(!) by the Twitter community. > To that end, we’re also taking significant steps to make Birdwatch transparent: - All(!???) data contributed to Birdwatch will be publicly available and downloadable in TSV files - As we develop algorithms that power Birdwatch — such as reputation and consensus systems — we aim to(!) publish that code(!) publicly in the Birdwatch Guide. The initial ranking system for Birdwatch is already available here. > We hope this will enable experts, researchers, and the public to analyze or audit Birdwatch, identifying opportunities or flaws that can help us(!) more quickly build an effective(!) community-driven(!) solution. If what they are saying is 100% true (and not at all misleading, and remains true going forward through time), this would be an extremely big deal. Modifications to the fundamental systems we use for collective communication and sense making is the obvious place a benevolent dictator would start to improve the current state of affairs. However, history strongly suggests that this is not only not true, but most likely knowingly untrue (aka: a lie). I am obviously speculating, but I think this is a reasonable speculation. Speculating sucks though. I think we are forced to do it far more often than is necessary (under the limitations imposed upon us by nature). So how about this idea: Let's say, in the spirit of uniting the country (USA), we make a bi-partisan decision to create a new role for the government: an as-honest-as-possible, process of constant audit of all "major" public communication platforms. Carefully selected, proven to be honest and trustworthy bi-partisan technical people (from the "grassroots" community) would be forcibly embedded within all major corporations, with 100% visibility into all source code, processes, and meetings (where "necessary"). They would carefully monitor the nature of all of this software that is exerting such a powerful force on our society, and that of the world. Where possible (which should be most of the time), their findings would be published for the public to see (and "sniff for imperfections or corruption"). These would be positions of extreme power and insight, and would offer genuine risks to intellectual property and confidential strategy of the companies subject to this treatment. As a first pass at managing this, these people could be paid extremely well, but they would also be subject to extremely punitive measures if they were to ever behave in a compromising manner. Of course, the flaws in such a plan are numerous. Reality is complex - we can face that head on and manage it, or bury our heads in the sand with speculative claims like "this wouldn't work". The general goal of this is to force(!) truthfulness (as opposed to honesty) into society. The world is what we make of it, and we can make this little corner of it how we want it to be. And if we happen to disagree with the specifics of "how we want it to be", then deal with it head on: figure it out, and ship to production. As I understand it, all politicians desire what is best for the entire country (and the world - they only differ on how to achieve this), as well as desire to govern based on The Truth - so I wouldn't expect we would get any pushback from them (and if we did, journalists would be on it, publishing salacious exposes on the obvious corruption) - that leaves the decision up to "we the people". On a scale of 1 to 10, how good/bad is this general idea? Is it a complete non-starter due to something I have overlooked (that cannot be changed)? Are there even better approaches than this? I have no idea, I am just trying to put some ideas out there for consideration. At some point, I think we have to do something to alter the trajectory we are on.
bserge 6y ago
Introducing Watchbird, a community-based approach to misinformation (heh). Posters: Get paid to post online, starting at $0.20/post! Our top posters earn up to $50/hour! Join now! Sponsors: We have over 50,000 active users ready to post whatever you need online, no questions asked! Similar services actually exist, but you know, one could always create a new one aimed at "fact checking" the fact checkers. I guess my point is, you can't solve this problem with even more crowd bullshit. It needs to be done at a fundamental level, preferably by governments in school. Afaik, there's still zero official classes/courses/lessons/whatever in most schools that would teach you to not trust everything you read and triple check everything yourself before believing anything. Plus, this is pretty prone to abuse. Individuals are inherently dangerous, and crowds even more so. Someone doesn't like person X, so they "fact check" his tweets. Others see this coming from a "reputable" poster and jump on the bandwagon. Seen it so many times it got old. Experimented with it myself. A post on Reddit (same content) that gets 8-12 fake upvotes in the first 30 minutes after being posted is infinitely more likely to start getting upvoted by hundreds of real users and get to the subreddit's hot front page than a post that got 0-3 upvotes, for example. I was interested in Reddit's voting system and learned some interesting stuff. They're really smart about it, you can't just have multiple accounts and some proxies/VPNs and go at it like in the good old days. Votes are going to be ignored unless you know what you're doing. Probably not news for anyone in the industry, but I found it interesting.
herewegoagain2 6y ago
Did anybody even ask for fact checking notes by Twitter? I don't think so. Whatever the Twitter fact checking note says, you should still not take any information from the internet at facee value.
colllectorof 6y ago
Nearly all attempts to "fix misinformation" on social media I've seen in the last several years ranged from hopelessly clueless to downright sinister. "Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading and write notes that provide informative context." You're not going to fix anything by attacking the symptoms, which is exactly what this seems to propose. To fix the actual problem we need to create systems that generate and propagate trustworthy information, which people actually want to consume rather than attacking information you don't want people to consume. "we have conducted more than 100 qualitative interviews with individuals across the political spectrum who use Twitter" There is already a selection bias in play then, because there are large numbers of people who don't use Twitter for various reasons.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  I agree with your characterization about attempts to fix misinformation. However, I don't think "what people actually want to consume" is a good signal for "trustworthy content"-if the social media era has shown us anything, it's that (barring a narrow band of critical, independent thinkers) we have an insatiable appetite for any content that reaffirms our tribalist priors, no matter how patently absurd the content may be. To the extent that Twitter's goal is to combat post-truth-ism (as opposed to propagating it by way of its current business model), I think it pretty much has to develop its own strict code of ethics which prizes honesty, integrity, neutrality, and objectivity like the academics and journalists of yore. Specifically, we need a media landscape (including social media) that once again rewards both sides for bringing their best arguments, rather than dual partisan media outlets. There's a very popular straw man counter-argument which is that I'm assuming that abhorrent racist ideas should be given the same attention as, I don't know, climate science, but that's not the case at all. Rather, I'm arguing that a neutralist and objective framework would discourage abhorrent racist ideas and encourage more respectable conservative intellectualism instead of the status quo which is to regard anything to the right of the far-left as uniformly vile (I'm oversimplifying a bit for sake of brevity). Similarly, such a platform wouldn't regard climate science and blank slatism as uniformly virtuous. The best left-wing thought would face-off against the best right-wing thought, and as a moderate liberal, I think the best left-wing thought will win. Importantly, this pulls everyone toward more fact-based positions, which tends to have a moderating effect. Unfortunately, the corollary is that this presents a political obstacle--those who are deeply committed to these kinds of post-truth ideologies tend to vigorously oppose such reforms.
hezag 6y ago
> [...] we’re designing Birdwatch to encourage contributions from people with diverse perspectives, and to reward contributions that are found helpful by a wide range of people. > For example, rather than ranking and selecting top notes by a simple majority vote, Birdwatch can consider how diverse a note’s set of ratings is and determine whether additional inputs are needed before a consensus is reached. Additionally, Birdwatch can proactively seek ratings from contributors who are likely to provide a different perspective based on their previous ratings. > Further, we plan for Birdwatch to have a reputation system in which one earns reputation for contributions that people from a wide range of perspectives find helpful. https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/about/challenges/ https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/about/challenges/
olah_1 6y ago
I just want to point out that Minds[1] has a pretty clever content moderation policy that involves an appeal process with randomly selected users of the platform making blind judgements. I haven’t been part of the process myself, nor have I used the platform yet at all. But this feature sounds quite good in theory. [1]: https://www.minds.com/content-policy https://www.minds.com/content-policy
- jarbus 6y ago
  This is the only other solution I've seen proposed in this thread that makes sense, thanks for posting
markmiro 6y ago
A lot of people are wondering how this will stop misinformation. I agree that we can't crowdsource truth. But we can crowdsource information that can help reduce misinformation. When you have two sides disagreeing the first step is to build some common ground. Twitter is trying to solve a tough problem. On one hand you've got people accusing Twitter of hosting and platforming hateful, harmful content. On the other hand you have people claiming that Twitter is calling the shots about what's true and suppressing information it doesn't like. Maybe this is the first step towards something like a digital court. People on both sides present evidence, experts, witnesses. The two sides get a hand in picking the jury. Or maybe the solvable problem is that information gets misconstrued and propagated. A video clip might get edited a certain way, for example. Solving this problem may not help us all agree on what happened in the video clip. However, we should at least be able to agree on what the two interpretations are. To make this happen, both sides would have to steel man the other side. Otherwise, the opposing side would claim they're being misportrayed. Having things that opposing sides agree upon would greatly help reduce unnecessary conflict.
- collyw 6y ago
  > People on both sides present evidence, experts, witnesses. The two sides get a hand in picking the jury. Over a twitter spat? Seems like a waste of resources.
szhu 6y ago
There's a lot of reason to doubt that this will work. But one thing makes me hopeful that this might actually work is that Wikipedia's "Talk" pages appear to serve a similar purpose, and they serve that purpose adequately.
dang 6y ago
There's another active thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25908439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25908439. Not sure whether to merge them.
shadowprofile77 6y ago
Sounds interesting, and I coyld definitely use something better than my filed, chaotic bookmarks to organize my collection of websites. The problem with this though? The same one that so many other systems for long term data organization can have: How do I know your service won't just die or fold sooner or later, leaving me and my organization efforts swinging in the wind? Bookmarks at least are just HTML files that can be exported, saved and imported across all browsers regardless of platform. Simple, resilient and thus robust.

75 points by razin 6y ago

> People come to Twitter to stay informed This seems to be the heart of the problem.

Reminds me of the Overwatch moderation system used by Valve to collect cheater data from human evaluators in Counter-Strike. Eventually, they leveraged that data to improve their automated cheat detection systems. [0] Although Twitter's problem is way harder, IMO. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc

5AMUR41 6y ago
This was actually a genius system on Valve's part. I think what makes these two systems different are a few things: -Overwatch at least had some method of selecting people that "knew about the game." People that had never ranked competitively in CSGO couldn't make decisions if someone was cheating, whereas it seems that the hopes for this new Twitter feature will be that anyone can "fact-check" a tweet. Even if evidence is required, it is beyond easy to find secondary sources that skew facts or statistics into a different connotation. -Whether or not someone is cheating is pretty binary. They either are or they aren't. One of my biggest concerns for Birdwatch is that it was likely be used on tweets that aren't binary statements of "write/wrong" facts, and will likely be used in mass-reports of those of other political stances. That, or shitposting

username3 6y ago

We need to see when a someone on one side disagrees with their own side. Echo chambers drown the voice of dissenters. We need to see when one side ignores the other side. We need a list of unanswered questions to hold every side accountable.

freeone3000 6y ago
Every side? "The other side"? Like you're going to hold the Leninists accountable for their unanswered claims against the Breadtubers for today's Voash drama? Or intervene with a fact check when someone says the 8052 is UV reprogrammable when only the modern clones are? Or for when the guy who talks about Magic the Gathering and was in Mulan makes an offhand comment about the new Harry Potter series and literally everyone gets upset? How are you even dividing sides?

hanniabu 6y ago

Who fact-checks the fact-checkers?

md_ 6y ago
The point here seems not to have independent professional fact-checkers, but to crowd-source it. On the one hand, I certainly struggle to see how more crowds will improve upon what is fundamentally a problem with crowds to begin with. On the other, Wikipedia seems to work reasonably well--and purely as a result of the community mores, not due to any sophisticated moderation algorithm or ranking structure or similar. I'm not holding my breath, but it is interesting to see if a community-driven effort imbued with a Wikipedian-like spirit might succeed where more automated efforts have not.
- briantakita 6y ago
  The underlying question is philosophical freedom vs authoritarianism. The same tactics can be utilized by different actors who have different worldviews. The Stasi utilized Crowdsourcing to enforce authoritarianism for example. One person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. One's misinformation is another's truth particularly when it comes to how information is interpreted & what is focused upon.
  - fellowniusmonk 6y ago
    Once a proposition is falsified a rational community would rejected it. Once your community or protocol "philosophically" rejects checksums it is only a matter of time before your system breaks catastrophically. This philosophical freedom vs authoritarianism thing you're proposing is a view that is incomplete and small to the point of being false. The actual underlying question is do you accept that grounded truth exists and are you willing to have a large and nuanced enough view to include all non false propositions and reject all false propositions.
  - md_ 6y ago
    Sure, and if you squint hard enough, there are similarities between having a warning label slapped on your Tweets and being thrown in a gulag for decades. But if you're squinting that hard, not a lot of light is getting through.

LargeWu 6y ago

Would be very interested to see how this addresses one of the primary underlying pathways of misinformation - confirmation bias. Many people believe information because it confirms their worldview; whether it's provably true or false is often irrelevant. In fact, I suspect that having a belief proved wrong often even reinforces that belief in some cases. How much does truth matter in a post-truth society?

c22 6y ago
I feel like we moved from pre-truth society to post-truth society alarmingly quickly. Perhaps we should dwell for longer in the age of truth.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
call_me_dana 6y ago
Truth still exists whether it’s completely hidden. Truth still exists if bad actors have injected 10 other believable stories alongside it. Truth still exists even if every fact checker calls the claim false. People have spent enormous sums of money and time to hide the truth from the public. Just because every effort has been made to hide the truth, doesn’t diminish the fact that the truth matters. In my opinion, it’s just the opposite. It matters more than ever.
- collyw 6y ago
  > Truth still exists whether it’s completely hidden That kind of depends if you are discussing something objective or not. Wikipedia seems to have developed a strong left wing bias on anything political these days. Articles without any kind of politics still seem to be pretty objective. Can there be a single truth in politics, where ideas are very subjective?
tomjen3 6y ago
Whether you believe in Covid or not if you inhale the virus you may develop the decease. If you don't believe in guns you may find some nasty people in your house who do, and you will not be able to defend yourself. The truth still reigns supreme, it is just that people sometimes suffer unnecessarily because they do not know what the truth is.

Pfhreak 6y ago

I'm curious what mechanisms will be in place, and how effective they will be, at preventing dogpiling on people using this system. As a specific example, as a nonbinary person, I'm constantly running into people online who tell me there are only two genders, or that singular they is some sort of new concept. My concern with a consensus system is that it will be used to shut down people like me (or trans folk, or socialists, etc. etc. etc.) How do you build a consensus system that protects minority persons and also weeds out misinformation? Edit: Downvotes for... being non-binary I guess?

cwkoss 6y ago
That's a great example of how this could go wrong. I hope the folks at Twitter are keeping examples like yours in mind as they develop this.
collyw 6y ago
I have never come across a gendered language with more than two genders. If you are referring to "gender identity", it would be a good idea to use that phrase rather than the ambiguity of "gender" which now means different things to different people.
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  Gender identity is a different concept. It's an internal conception of what gender you are. Compare that to, for instance, gender presentation, which is an outward facing set of traits that correspond to which gender you are showing others. Gender, in the context of language referring to a person, has a fairly settled meaning.
  - collyw 6y ago
    As someone classed as middle aged, gender is a synonym for sex to me, as it had been for decades. If you want to introduce new concepts, it would be easier for everyone if you used new words instead of trying to take over existing words. https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/77468 https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/77468

neartheplain 6y ago

How will Twitter prevent the sort of organized brigading and domination of the always-online crowd which plagues such crowdsourced review programs?

Pfhreak 6y ago
This is the central question. If someone isn't asking, "What would a malicious user do with this system?" and inserting their favorite internet bogeymen as a thought experiment, they haven't finished their design. This is doubly true for safety systems. I don't see much of the press release focused on how abuse of the safety system will be avoided beyond, "We'll eventually let it be reviewed by outside parties."
- ourlordcaffeine 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure this project will just turn into opposing groups marking anything they disagree with as disinformation, the bigger group succeeding in having control of the narrative. What's to stop a flood of Russian accounts gaining control of what's marked as disinformation?
kyleblarson 6y ago
They won't prevent it. This is clearly by design on Twitter's part given that the always-online bluecheck crowd leans so far left.
manojlds 6y ago
I liked some blockchain / crypto based ideas people were having - like you have to use crypto to even say something is fake or not. A journalist has to "pledge" crypto that a news is not fake and the smart contract releases the amount back based on certain evaluations like if the post was voted as fake or not etc. (I am sure as described there will be holes, but I like the direction it was heading.)
- fwip 6y ago
  That just becomes "rich people decide."

salmonellaeater 6y ago

> As we develop algorithms that power Birdwatch — such as reputation and consensus systems Consensus is the enemy of understanding. For topics where there is conflicting or poor evidence or that bear on the culture war, I do not want people voting on what is the consensus truth. I want to see all the evidence. We have enough problems with researchers not publishing uncomfortable data; I don't want the little that exists flagged because it conflicts with the average Twitter user's sensibilities.

ardy42 6y ago
> Consensus is the enemy of understanding. For topics where there is conflicting or poor evidence or that bear on the culture war, I do not want people voting on what is the consensus truth. I want to see all the evidence. That's a nice sentiment in a vacuum, but we're not in a vacuum. It's sort of like focusing on getting every child a college education when you can't even manage to teach them all literacy yet. At the point, I feel like the priority needs to be around figuring out a way to defeat disinformation and misinformation to restore some kind of common ground understanding of the facts. The marketplace of ideas can't function if major factions reject truth-seeking in favor of blatant lies that are appealing for various other reasons (e.g. emotional satisfaction, ability to manipulate others, etc.).
- offby37years 6y ago
  Groups search for consensus, individuals for truth. Without consensus groups fracture. Without truth we're destined for the next dark age.
- nailer 6y ago
  No. Truth does not flow from consensus like a college degree follows from literacy.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  We can all agree that chocolate is the best form of ice cream. Those who would disagree are obviously trolls spreading disinformation. The marketplace of ice cream can't function if we have other flavors like pistachio or strawberry being labeled "best" instead of the only truely best ice cream. Obviously these strawberry promoters are just manipulating other gullible ice cream consumers for their own ends.

peanut_worm 6y ago

Totally thought this was related to the Backyard Bird Count this year lol

oh_sigh 6y ago

I suspect this will be minorly used for direct misinformation control("Donald Rumsfeld is not a lizard person"), but mostly used for narrative control("While this fact is true by itself, you need to look at the bigger context..."), and so will be entirely ineffective. People readily take up new information, but are very hesitant to change their internal narrative on a matter. Especially when they're being told by others what their narrative should be. Double especially if part of their narrative is that big tech/liberals/academia/coastal elites/etc are trying to feed you the Big Lie. Conservative misinformation is a big talking point for liberals, and maybe the big societal issue at the moment, but as a small scale test run, I'd love to see birdwatch try to correct the record for misinformation that is commonly believed in liberal circles: Anti-GMO, anti-vaxx, toxic whiteness, the extents of systemic racism in our society, some of the more dire prognostications of nuclear war and global warming.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

thimkerbell 6y ago

Muddying the discourse is next-generation trolling.

anewaccount2021 6y ago

This will be a kangaroo court used to blunt-force-trauma a select subset of strawmen and deplorables off of the service. In the end, does anyone really care if Twitter is "truthful"?

5AMUR41 6y ago
> In the end, does anyone really care if Twitter is "truthful"? As it's becoming an ever-increasing method of communication between government officials and whatnot, I'd say some amount of "truthfulness" and "validity" is warranted. The other day a member of the US government (I think it was Ted Cruz? I can't find it at the moment) wrote a tweet that implied he thought the Paris Climate agreement only affected the citizens of Paris. Something as factually "write/wrong" as that should be able to be contested and held accountable to being "wrong" That being said, I agree with you that this will not be used as intended and will undoubtedly lead to more confusion and confirmation bias from all sides. Using crowd-sourced knowledge in this manner leads to the assumption that "what the majority thinks is right is factual," and I'm reminded it was once "fact" that the sun rotated around the Earth

call_me_dana 6y ago

On the surface, it sounds really nice. But anyone who’s paying attention in the fake news era has a general idea on what this will be used for. Any tweets questioning the official narrative will be roundly criticized and ridiculed. Instead of having to delve into a long reply thread to see debunkers make their case, there will be an easy to digest notice within grasp. Which is not necessarily a bad thing if it is used fairly and responsibly. But judging on Twitter’s past performance, it likely won’t be. Dissent will be publicly humiliated while pure disinformation from governments, think tanks, and corporations have no such objections. Any doubts to the accepted story will be pointed at one of the fact checker sites and further inquiries censored. In an honest world, this would be one giant step to finally getting at the truth. But this isn’t an honest world, is it?

wtetzner 6y ago
> In an honest world, this would be one giant step to finally getting at the truth. But this isn’t an honest world, is it? Not to mention that in an honest wold, why would you even need something like this? You don't need it in an honest world, and it will end up being worse than nothing in a dishonest world. It doesn't seem like a good idea in any scenario.
- mistermann 6y ago
  > Not to mention that in an honest world, why would you even need something like this? The world is what we make it - we are the masters of our own destiny. This is literally true (subject to boundaries imposed on us by nature: the laws of physics, the physical resources available to us, the nature of the evolved human mind and the societies we have built for ourselves to operate in, and other things I may overlook). If a variable in the world is not to our liking, and it is fixable, we can choose to fix it (as a collective species), or not. Mother Nature imposes some restrictions on this, but not many. From the article: > To date, we have conducted more than 100 qualitative interviews with individuals across the political spectrum who use Twitter, and we received broad general support for Birdwatch. In particular, people valued notes being in the community’s voice (rather than that of Twitter or a central authority) and appreciated that notes provided useful context to help them better understand and evaluate a Tweet (rather than focusing on labeling content as “true” or “false”). Our goal(!) is to build Birdwatch in the open, and have it shaped(!) by the Twitter community. > To that end, we’re also taking significant steps to make Birdwatch transparent: - All(!???) data contributed to Birdwatch will be publicly available and downloadable in TSV files - As we develop algorithms that power Birdwatch — such as reputation and consensus systems — we aim to(!) publish that code(!) publicly in the Birdwatch Guide. The initial ranking system for Birdwatch is already available here. > We hope this will enable experts, researchers, and the public to analyze or audit Birdwatch, identifying opportunities or flaws that can help us(!) more quickly build an effective(!) community-driven(!) solution. If what they are saying is 100% true (and not at all misleading, and remains true going forward through time), this would be an extremely big deal. Modifications to the fundamental systems we use for collective communication and sense making is the obvious place a benevolent dictator would start to improve the current state of affairs. However, history strongly suggests that this is not only not true, but most likely knowingly untrue (aka: a lie). I am obviously speculating, but I think this is a reasonable speculation. Speculating sucks though. I think we are forced to do it far more often than is necessary (under the limitations imposed upon us by nature). So how about this idea: Let's say, in the spirit of uniting the country (USA), we make a bi-partisan decision to create a new role for the government: an as-honest-as-possible, process of constant audit of all "major" public communication platforms. Carefully selected, proven to be honest and trustworthy bi-partisan technical people (from the "grassroots" community) would be forcibly embedded within all major corporations, with 100% visibility into all source code, processes, and meetings (where "necessary"). They would carefully monitor the nature of all of this software that is exerting such a powerful force on our society, and that of the world. Where possible (which should be most of the time), their findings would be published for the public to see (and "sniff for imperfections or corruption"). These would be positions of extreme power and insight, and would offer genuine risks to intellectual property and confidential strategy of the companies subject to this treatment. As a first pass at managing this, these people could be paid extremely well, but they would also be subject to extremely punitive measures if they were to ever behave in a compromising manner. Of course, the flaws in such a plan are numerous. Reality is complex - we can face that head on and manage it, or bury our heads in the sand with speculative claims like "this wouldn't work". The general goal of this is to force(!) truthfulness (as opposed to honesty) into society. The world is what we make of it, and we can make this little corner of it how we want it to be. And if we happen to disagree with the specifics of "how we want it to be", then deal with it head on: figure it out, and ship to production. As I understand it, all politicians desire what is best for the entire country (and the world - they only differ on how to achieve this), as well as desire to govern based on The Truth - so I wouldn't expect we would get any pushback from them (and if we did, journalists would be on it, publishing salacious exposes on the obvious corruption) - that leaves the decision up to "we the people". On a scale of 1 to 10, how good/bad is this general idea? Is it a complete non-starter due to something I have overlooked (that cannot be changed)? Are there even better approaches than this? I have no idea, I am just trying to put some ideas out there for consideration. At some point, I think we have to do something to alter the trajectory we are on.

bserge 6y ago

Introducing Watchbird, a community-based approach to misinformation (heh). Posters: Get paid to post online, starting at $0.20/post! Our top posters earn up to $50/hour! Join now! Sponsors: We have over 50,000 active users ready to post whatever you need online, no questions asked! Similar services actually exist, but you know, one could always create a new one aimed at "fact checking" the fact checkers. I guess my point is, you can't solve this problem with even more crowd bullshit. It needs to be done at a fundamental level, preferably by governments in school. Afaik, there's still zero official classes/courses/lessons/whatever in most schools that would teach you to not trust everything you read and triple check everything yourself before believing anything. Plus, this is pretty prone to abuse. Individuals are inherently dangerous, and crowds even more so. Someone doesn't like person X, so they "fact check" his tweets. Others see this coming from a "reputable" poster and jump on the bandwagon. Seen it so many times it got old. Experimented with it myself. A post on Reddit (same content) that gets 8-12 fake upvotes in the first 30 minutes after being posted is infinitely more likely to start getting upvoted by hundreds of real users and get to the subreddit's hot front page than a post that got 0-3 upvotes, for example. I was interested in Reddit's voting system and learned some interesting stuff. They're really smart about it, you can't just have multiple accounts and some proxies/VPNs and go at it like in the good old days. Votes are going to be ignored unless you know what you're doing. Probably not news for anyone in the industry, but I found it interesting.

herewegoagain2 6y ago

Did anybody even ask for fact checking notes by Twitter? I don't think so. Whatever the Twitter fact checking note says, you should still not take any information from the internet at facee value.

colllectorof 6y ago

Nearly all attempts to "fix misinformation" on social media I've seen in the last several years ranged from hopelessly clueless to downright sinister. "Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading and write notes that provide informative context." You're not going to fix anything by attacking the symptoms, which is exactly what this seems to propose. To fix the actual problem we need to create systems that generate and propagate trustworthy information, which people actually want to consume rather than attacking information you don't want people to consume. "we have conducted more than 100 qualitative interviews with individuals across the political spectrum who use Twitter" There is already a selection bias in play then, because there are large numbers of people who don't use Twitter for various reasons.

throwaway894345 6y ago
I agree with your characterization about attempts to fix misinformation. However, I don't think "what people actually want to consume" is a good signal for "trustworthy content"-if the social media era has shown us anything, it's that (barring a narrow band of critical, independent thinkers) we have an insatiable appetite for any content that reaffirms our tribalist priors, no matter how patently absurd the content may be. To the extent that Twitter's goal is to combat post-truth-ism (as opposed to propagating it by way of its current business model), I think it pretty much has to develop its own strict code of ethics which prizes honesty, integrity, neutrality, and objectivity like the academics and journalists of yore. Specifically, we need a media landscape (including social media) that once again rewards both sides for bringing their best arguments, rather than dual partisan media outlets. There's a very popular straw man counter-argument which is that I'm assuming that abhorrent racist ideas should be given the same attention as, I don't know, climate science, but that's not the case at all. Rather, I'm arguing that a neutralist and objective framework would discourage abhorrent racist ideas and encourage more respectable conservative intellectualism instead of the status quo which is to regard anything to the right of the far-left as uniformly vile (I'm oversimplifying a bit for sake of brevity). Similarly, such a platform wouldn't regard climate science and blank slatism as uniformly virtuous. The best left-wing thought would face-off against the best right-wing thought, and as a moderate liberal, I think the best left-wing thought will win. Importantly, this pulls everyone toward more fact-based positions, which tends to have a moderating effect. Unfortunately, the corollary is that this presents a political obstacle--those who are deeply committed to these kinds of post-truth ideologies tend to vigorously oppose such reforms.

hezag 6y ago

> [...] we’re designing Birdwatch to encourage contributions from people with diverse perspectives, and to reward contributions that are found helpful by a wide range of people. > For example, rather than ranking and selecting top notes by a simple majority vote, Birdwatch can consider how diverse a note’s set of ratings is and determine whether additional inputs are needed before a consensus is reached. Additionally, Birdwatch can proactively seek ratings from contributors who are likely to provide a different perspective based on their previous ratings. > Further, we plan for Birdwatch to have a reputation system in which one earns reputation for contributions that people from a wide range of perspectives find helpful. https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/about/challenges/ https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/about/challenges/

olah_1 6y ago

I just want to point out that Minds[1] has a pretty clever content moderation policy that involves an appeal process with randomly selected users of the platform making blind judgements. I haven’t been part of the process myself, nor have I used the platform yet at all. But this feature sounds quite good in theory. [1]: https://www.minds.com/content-policy https://www.minds.com/content-policy

jarbus 6y ago
This is the only other solution I've seen proposed in this thread that makes sense, thanks for posting

markmiro 6y ago

A lot of people are wondering how this will stop misinformation. I agree that we can't crowdsource truth. But we can crowdsource information that can help reduce misinformation. When you have two sides disagreeing the first step is to build some common ground. Twitter is trying to solve a tough problem. On one hand you've got people accusing Twitter of hosting and platforming hateful, harmful content. On the other hand you have people claiming that Twitter is calling the shots about what's true and suppressing information it doesn't like. Maybe this is the first step towards something like a digital court. People on both sides present evidence, experts, witnesses. The two sides get a hand in picking the jury. Or maybe the solvable problem is that information gets misconstrued and propagated. A video clip might get edited a certain way, for example. Solving this problem may not help us all agree on what happened in the video clip. However, we should at least be able to agree on what the two interpretations are. To make this happen, both sides would have to steel man the other side. Otherwise, the opposing side would claim they're being misportrayed. Having things that opposing sides agree upon would greatly help reduce unnecessary conflict.

collyw 6y ago
> People on both sides present evidence, experts, witnesses. The two sides get a hand in picking the jury. Over a twitter spat? Seems like a waste of resources.

szhu 6y ago

There's a lot of reason to doubt that this will work. But one thing makes me hopeful that this might actually work is that Wikipedia's "Talk" pages appear to serve a similar purpose, and they serve that purpose adequately.

dang 6y ago

There's another active thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25908439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25908439. Not sure whether to merge them.

shadowprofile77 6y ago

Sounds interesting, and I coyld definitely use something better than my filed, chaotic bookmarks to organize my collection of websites. The problem with this though? The same one that so many other systems for long term data organization can have: How do I know your service won't just die or fold sooner or later, leaving me and my organization efforts swinging in the wind? Bookmarks at least are just HTML files that can be exported, saved and imported across all browsers regardless of platform. Simple, resilient and thus robust.