20 ms·

Birdwatch, Twitter's collaborative fact checking system

373 points by mcint 4y ago

mcint 4y ago
Birdwatch is a collaborative way to add helpful context to Tweets and keep people better informed Birdwatch is a pilot program that aims to create a better-informed world. It empowers people on Twitter to collaboratively add helpful notes to Tweets that might be misleading. https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch https://twitter.com/birdwatch https://twitter.com/birdwatch
- fazfq 4y ago
  "empowers" is such a red flag in my book...
  - Eupraxias 4y ago
    Sounds like its time for a new book, but you don't have to take my word for it...
    - aksss 4y ago
      Or stop using rhetorical buzzwords and the language of demagoguery.
easytiger 4y ago
Lol. So trivially abusable
- theCrowing 4y ago
  As it was designed it's all about liability and like this twitter has none.
- vntok 4y ago
  > To find notes that are helpful to the broadest possible set of people, Birdwatch takes into account not only how many contributors rated a note as helpful or unhelpful, but also whether people who rated it seem to come from different perspectives. > Birdwatch assesses “different perspectives” entirely based on how people have rated notes in the past; Birdwatch does not ask about or use any other information to do this (e.g. demographics like location, gender, or political affiliation, or data from Twitter such as follows or Tweets). This is based on the intuition that Contributors who tend to rate the same notes similarly are likely to have more similar perspectives while contributors who rate notes differently are likely to have different perspectives. If people who typically disagree in their ratings agree that a given note is helpful, it’s probably a good indicator the note is helpful to people from different points of view. https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/diversity-of-perspectives/ https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/diversity-of-perspective...
  - easytiger 4y ago
    and?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - vntok 4y ago
      How would you trivially abuse this?
      - easytiger 4y ago
        > but also whether people who rated it seem to come from different perspectives. How do you achieve that?
        vntok 4y ago
        It was explained in the paragraph immediately below the sentence you quoted. Here it is again: > Birdwatch assesses “different perspectives” entirely based on how people have rated notes in the past; Birdwatch does not ask about or use any other information to do this (e.g. demographics like location, gender, or political affiliation, or data from Twitter such as follows or Tweets). This is based on the intuition that Contributors who tend to rate the same notes similarly are likely to have more similar perspectives while contributors who rate notes differently are likely to have different perspectives. If people who typically disagree in their ratings agree that a given note is helpful, it’s probably a good indicator the note is helpful to people from different points of view. https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/diversity-of-perspectives/ https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/diversity-of-perspective...
Hamuko 4y ago
I'm afraid of what every single political tweet will look like now.
- dbbk 4y ago
  This has been around for ages, it's not new
- dandanua 4y ago
  https://twitter.com/wallstmemes/status/1586409344395976704 https://twitter.com/wallstmemes/status/1586409344395976704 People who lie the most will "fact check" their opponents.
- vntok 4y ago
  This is a feature.
alex23478 4y ago
Just to make sure I didn't miss anything: They're not paying anyone for their fact-checking?
- fazfq 4y ago
  Isn't putting whatever you want next to a popular guy's tweets enough payment?
- neura 4y ago
  I mean... they don't pay anybody for it, or actually have any sort of fact-checking right now... and they're still one of the most dominant cessp... err, social media sites.
- melbourne_mat 4y ago
  How to save some cash: 1. Fire your staff, 2. outsource their work to the general public. Brilliant! But seriously folks: Twitter is rubbish. Find something more useful to do with your time.
  - vntok 4y ago
    > How to save some cash: 1. Fire your staff, 2. outsource their work to the general public. Brilliant! What are you talking about? This program has existed at Twitter for years.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    > How to save some cash: 1. Fire your staff, 2. outsource their work to the general public. Brilliant! Imagine this as a sarcastic comment about why a country shouldn't move from a monarchy to a republic.
- veidr 4y ago
  This particular technology initiative does appear to be an effort to build a system that harnesses unpaid volunteers as fact-checkers. However, according to today's front-page Washington Post[1] article, they are also still paying people in the "Trust & Safety" department, to do jobs including fact-checking (and presumably acting on fact-checking done by other humans, and possibly trained-model automated fact-checkers as well). From what I can understand, the company was recently purchased by an oligarch, who then implemented massive staff cuts of around 50% generally across the board, but the "Trust & Safety" department had a lower level of layoffs, at around 15%. So human staff is apparently still involved in fact-checking, aside from the system described here. It seems likely that fact-checking on a global "social media" network would necessarily involve various approaches and multiple layers to be effective, so the core idea of this system seems worth trying. However, it is a difficult problem, with powerful financial and political incentives for various parties to game such a system, it will be interesting to see if this ever yields results, and if so, what those results are. [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/05/twitter-layoffs-election-impact/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/05/twitter...
saurik 4y ago
Prior discussions with comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25906672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25906672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25908439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25908439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25906775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25906775 An article arguing for a different UI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25935407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25935407 Discussion from yesterday on a thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474196 In that final discussion SilasX noted: > Interesting, I remember someone on /r/slatestarcodex having the idea to rate/sort reddit comments by that metric, which I dub "sort by should-be-uncontroversial" (because normally-disagreeing people all think it's correct). Honestly, that sorting mechanism sounds sane to me? It certainly sounds a lot saner than optimizing for engaging content (which seems to result in arguments), but I would guess is a lot less profitable (and so likely won't happen). But like, in a world where informative comments actually were sorted highly, wouldn't that mostly obviate the need for this notes / fact checking system in the first place? Put differently, isn't the very existence of and interest in this second system for voting on content attached to a tweet a demonstration that the primary system (for sorting replies, which are merely content attached to a tweet) sucks?
- highwaylights 4y ago
  This might be the one real value proposition to come out of all of this (if there is one). Part of the scoring metric is awarding more weight to historically diaposed views. Bold strategy, let’s see if it pans out for them Cotton etc. At worst it stays a cesspool, but maybe we find a way to (shock horror) promote actual civil discourse on the Internet.
- maeil 4y ago
  Such a scoring mechanism sounds useful at first but on websites like Reddit it would likely cause puns, cultural references and such to be even more dominant than they already are, as those are most likely to be similarly appreciated by "normally-disagreeing people". I could only see it add much value on heavily moderated/high-effort sites like HN, where there's much less need for it in the first place.
theCrowing 4y ago
Who watches the Birdwatchers? Joke aside that's an experiment I can appreciate at least it will show us how bot invested and deranged twitter and it's users really are. I actually thought it was launched months ago..
- plazmatic 4y ago
- thinkingemote 4y ago
  You can download all the data apparently, so you could watch the birdwatchers! However although users get a permanent id it's not possible to get actual Twitter handles from these ids. So identification of who the birdwatchers are is not easy (wisely so)!
- altacc 4y ago
  From the page: "We believe regular people can valuably contribute to identifying and adding helpful context to potentially misleading information." That'll end well! ;) Problem is that on Twitter people aren't "regular", they're either seeking their own echo chamber for confirmation bias or the opposing echo chamber to insult, so crowd sourced feedback will simply be used as a tool for either of those.
  - davedx 4y ago
    I dunno, Wikipedia is 100% based on regular contributors and it's turned out exceptionally well
    - blitzar 4y ago
      Wikipedia is not for profit, twitter is.
    - insickness 4y ago
      It doesn't work for controversial topics.
    - 4y ago
uri4 4y ago
It is centralised and only for US. I am not going to participate on any platform that is not decentralised, federated and zero trust. In past I put a lot of effort into various forums. Well sourced information, several thousands hours of work. But very ofter it was all wasted, wiped and deleted. Now I only write books. There are well established censorship laws. And work I put into writing book will be preserved!
- fredgrott 4y ago
  ahem you do already, it's called the internet! Maybe you forgot internet is not decentralized.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    Actually the internet is decentralised. It's just that a lot of people either don't know or simply aren't willing to trade convenience for ideological purity. Anybody can run a web server at home, get a domain name, write a Twitter clone, host it and publish whatever content they like. And when you exceed your traffic limits you can take that web server, drive to your local co-located provider and in almost all cases they will let you grow that site almost ad infinitum provided the content isn't illegal. You don't need to ask permission. You don't need to compromise your ideology. You can just do it. But people don't want freedom or decentralisation. What they want is the ability to say anything they like and for everyone to hear it.
    - nunobrito 4y ago
      So the "actshually" meme comes true. Instead of reddit-style legalisms, just try to be more human and understand their perspective for a change. People do have the desire and right to ask for mainstream platforms to be decentralized. Is it feasible today? Technically: yes, realistically: no. Why? Because even MORE people are needed to effectively demand the right for mainstream platforms to be decentralized. You know that. Now be nice to them, please.
      - deleted 4y ago
xiphias2 4y ago
While I agree with most of the comments that it can be easily abused, if the bots can be kicked out, this (trying to get rid of echo chambers and highlighting posts from people with different viewpoints recognized by the algorithm) would be a better way for all social media to work than what we have now. In the current situation (showing most liked posts) the only common ground is good looking people (TikTok/Instagram/Youtube shorts) and most outraging posts with lies to get more likes (Twitter/Youtube)
- ceres 4y ago
  > this (trying to get rid of echo chambers and highlighting posts from people with different viewpoints recognized by the algorithm) would be a better But people _want_ echo chambers. No one wants to be in a group where people share opinions that they dislike. It’s just human nature. Why do you think private Facebook groups are so popular?
  - pjc50 4y ago
    The other day I saw "Trending in Sports: The Jews" on the Twitter trending topics page. I do not want to see that. Maybe we need the "echo chambers are better than gas chambers" slogan.
    - somenameforme 4y ago
      The reason echo chambers are dangerous is precisely because of the lack of dissent. Imagine politics is little more than a math problem. The actual answer is 0, but one group insists the answer can't be any smaller than 43, and another group insists there's no way it can be large than -51. Split these two groups off on their own, and they're just going to diverge more and more. Those in the bigger group will flaunt their in-group virtue by insisting on ever large numbers, and vice versa for those in the other group. They will diverge further and further from reality, but bring them together and the two sides help keep other in check. Getting back to real history, the Nazis were never notably popular. Their best result in anything like a fair election was in 1932 where they took 37% of the vote [1]. They managed to get an enabling act passed by political maneuvering, not genuine popularity. At that point they created an artificial echo chamber, and the rest is history. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_1932_German_federal_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_1932_German_federal_elect...
samwillis 4y ago
For important context, this isn't new (it started a couple of years ago I believe), and has not been introduced by the new owner. It is not related to outsourcing work to unpaid volunteers that was previously done by paid employees who have been made redundant during the layoffs over the last few days.
- blitzar 4y ago
  > this isn't new (it started a couple of years ago I believe) 4 CEOs have supported this project ... so far.
  - cpach 4y ago
    Huh! Never heard of it before.
- aaron695 4y ago
  > done by paid employees who have been made redundant Could you cite this. I'm not saying you are a liar pushing misinformation, but it's fair and important that you link the proof I think. For instance we know Keith Coleman wasn't sacked and Musk said the project is awesome https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587798343622737925 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587798343622737925 so your fact is surprising. We should be able to read for ourselves. Especially if we tell other people this information it allows us to link back. A chain of facts. If you know it personally, that also gives us context.
  - sgerenser 4y ago
    Poster you’re replying to said it’s not replacing work done by paid, now laid off, employees.
    - iinnPP 4y ago
      It is worded in a way that 'can' imply that there has been a switch from paid worker to unpaid volunteer. 'it is not related to X' suggests that X exists in order to be the subject of such a relation.
est 4y ago
the most strange part is it's hosted on Github Really, a for-profit company can't host some static pages properly under its own domain.
- CSDude 4y ago
  I thought the exact same thing. But then I noticed some code is also open-source. https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch/tree/main/static/sourcecode https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch/tree/main/static/source...
oxff 4y ago
"Collaborative fact check" really does show that there is a demarcation between "fact" and "truth".
jbverschoor 4y ago
So who's paying for free 'collaborative' research work? I guess it'll pay about $8 month
- codyogden 4y ago
  No no no. You see? If you want to be a Birdwatch contributor, you'll have to pay them. /s It's actually pretty okay. The contributor & rating system seems to work well, and contributions are anonymous. I participate mostly through rating contributions a little here and there when I see some things that are wildly unfounded or misleading claims.
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
    I dunno.. I think I'd go crazy with all the BS being posted these days.. It would probably make me wanna walk off of the edge of the earth.
jb1991 4y ago
Hi, birdwatcher here. I resent the implication that the time honored tradition and enjoyment one gets from watching birds could be used as a metaphor for adjudicating the integrity of bad actors on social media. One is a graceful reflection on the pristine experience of being alive, the other is a form of policing bad behavior. It is a shame they had to soil such a worthy endeavor as birdwatching with this name.
- joelrunyon 4y ago
  Twitterati would have been a much more apt/fun name.
  - christophilus 4y ago
    Twaughtpolice?
    - HlessClaudesman 4y ago
      Twat Police?
      - z9znz 4y ago
        Hi. Twatwatcher and lover here. I resent the implication that a twat is a bad thing which need policing. Yeah, one meaning of the word is synonymous with "fool", but let's not encourage overloading the word since one of the meanings is related to that which is necessary for human life (and is also quite fun) with stupid human behavior.
        sfmike 4y ago
        Ironically It's an implication that something of which is policed is a bad thing.
        HlessClaudesman 4y ago
        In my experience, having lived in a few English speaking countries, "twat" is commonly understood as a fool, whereas it's derivative "twot" can be used to describe either a fool or for female genitalia. So given this distinction, I am very much pro twot but anti twat. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twat
DeathArrow 4y ago
Fact checking systems can be and are gamed. I rather have the plain content and let everyone decide if it is true or false.
- vntok 4y ago
  There isn't enough time in a no-sleep 24h day to verify every single piece of content one is reading/hearing online that same day. Just go to any major news site's homepage; there's at least 40 articles there, plus videos. Count the number of tweets or instas you're glancing upon on your feed, they're infinitely loading below your thumbs. Self-service fact-checking is not scalable.
  - mistermann 4y ago
    > There isn't enough time in a no-sleep 24h day to verify every single piece of content one is reading/hearing online that same day. If it was necessary to fact check every tweet, this would be a big problem. Luckily though, that is not a requirement. With a proper implementation, it should be reasonably easy to surface a historic list of (a subset of) any given user's incorrect statements, which provides objective evidence to distrust someone's claims and opinions. With the style of epistemology practiced by most people in 2022, everyone is going to have black marks on their history. And if we had a cultural change as a consequence of this, people might start putting some effort into speaking in the form of true statements. > Just go to any major news site's homepage; there's at least 40 articles there, plus videos. Count the number of tweets or instas you're glancing upon on your feed, they're infinitely loading below your thumbs. Establish a persistent and centralized list of well fact checked "untruths" (rhetoric, innuendo, etc) from popular media outlets, and we will then have undeniable evidence that can be easily referenced, making common claims that mainstream media is ~"not that bad" transparently false. > Self-service fact-checking is not scalable. There is an important difference between scalability and infinite scalability. If Elon is smart, this feature could be a very big problem for belief shapers.
RootKitBeerCat 4y ago
Crowdsourcing content moderation always turns out real well
rvba 4y ago
How does it prevent an organized group of trolls who maek everything as "true". Or everyrhing from a source as "false"? Does it have some sort of a "raid" prevention? What about sleeper accounts made earlier to abuse this system?
pluc 4y ago
So they went the Reddit way: free labour.
- iinnPP 4y ago
  Any company taking user content for profit is doing the same. Including this website.
z9znz 4y ago
I'm skeptical that using a wikipedia-like approach will work for small, essentially ephemeral content. There's just not enough time to debate each tweet, especially now that so many people (with large followings) tweet so much debatable content frequently. There's probably also not enough interest... or the interest and fascination with moderating will wane quickly (fatique). Reading the various recent news items about Twitter, one would think that Musk was trying to revert the company to a crowdsource startup. I don't think that's possible, at least not without shedding a great many of the users. Of course, I also think the entire system and premise behind Twitter is bunk, so it doesn't really matter.
- mistermann 4y ago
  I don't think there's necessarily a need to fact check every tweet. If fact checks are maintained in a list, and one can navigate from a user account to their position in the list which also shows their past history of fact checked falsehoods/untruthfulness/lying, it could make a difference. I think the general public is intelligent enough to start to come up with strategies to target the most influential people (politicians, journalists, activists, celebrities, etc) and work down from there. Of course, fact checking is a complicated skill, but people can learn new skills. The public learning new skills on social media on an ongoing basis may be problematic for some people, but it could be very healthy for the overall ecosystem.
jengland 4y ago
Does anyone here know how it works and thinks it can be easily abused? The paper is here[0], but I would be satisfied with an explanation from anyone who just generally knows what "bridge-based ranking"[1] is. I'm pretty excited about the idea and I wonder if people mostly just don't know or if I am being too optimistic. [0]: https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch/blob/main/birdwatch_paper_2022_10_27.pdf https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch/blob/main/birdwatch_pap... [1]: https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/bridging-based-ranking https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/bridging-based-rank...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  I think this problem is similar to fighting spam, or ranking webpages for search queries: you don't want to be too public with your methods, because any metric can be gamed. I actually suspect "bridge-based ranking" has already been deployed on a large scale, and the group that did so has not publicly disclosed this -- likely for good reason. (There is a big social media site that used to be famous for having terrible comments. You fill in the rest...) In any case, yes it is very exciting. Including from an epistemological point of view -- the idea of promoting arguments that actually change someone's mind is pretty cool (assuming the argument is sound and truthful).
- BryantD 4y ago
  The source code is also in that repo, so easy enough to dig into it. Harder to form a useful opinion, at least for me.
- shakna 4y ago
  The greatest weakness in the scoring system [0] that I can see is age. There is a requirement for valid scoring to occur within 48 hours. > Made within the first 48 hours of the note’s creation (because we publicly release all rating data after 48 hours) [1] However, in the real world, our understanding of a message's context may actually take much longer than that. Especially when more information can come to light, that changes the landscape. The second greatest weakness I see is that rater's with a lower mean are automatically filtered. Whilst you can discuss using APIs to do it, if you have large groups of individuals dedicated to promoting specific viewpoints, you can utilise that manpower to de-rate anyone promoting an opposing view by ruining their helpfulness average. That makes the system easily abused by highly motivated political factions, especially foreign ones that admit to employing large groups of people for such a purpose. > Their rater helpfulness score must be at least 0.66 [1] [0] https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch/blob/main/static/sourcecode/helpfulness_scores.py https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch/blob/main/static/source... [1] https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/contributor-scores/#valid-ratings https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/contributor-scores/#vali...
hristov 4y ago
So if it is, on one hand, "collaborative" and it expects people to work for free, and on the other hand there is apparently so much value in putting misinformation on twitter, wouldn't most people that work on that be paid by the various parties that want to put misinformation on twitter? You know how amazon reviews are collaborative and volunteer based and 99% of them are made for money and are easily spotted lies.
- baxtr 4y ago
  Easy. We just need a collaborative fact checking system for the collaborative fact checking system.
- vntok 4y ago
  Paying some of those people to manipulate reviews wouldn't really work at scale. See here how Twitter automatically ranks reviews: https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/diversity-of-perspectives/ https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/diversity-of-perspective... > To find notes that are helpful to the broadest possible set of people, Birdwatch takes into account not only how many contributors rated a note as helpful or unhelpful, but also whether people who rated it seem to come from different perspectives. > Birdwatch assesses “different perspectives” entirely based on how people have rated notes in the past; Birdwatch does not ask about or use any other information to do this (e.g. demographics like location, gender, or political affiliation, or data from Twitter such as follows or Tweets). This is based on the intuition that Contributors who tend to rate the same notes similarly are likely to have more similar perspectives while contributors who rate notes differently are likely to have different perspectives.
lifeisstillgood 4y ago
Isn't this ... science for everyday things? I'm fascinated by the idea that we have enabled everyone to talk to everyone else and now have to find ways to agree on, what are and are not facts, what is and is not "acceptable". Eons ago we old buffers dreamed of a new world online - a virtual world. And we built it. And it has the same problems and we are trying to find almost the same solutions - but they fit differently. And there is opportunity- to share wealth and knowledge and spread out power. It should be a more democratic world. Virtually.
machina_ex_deus 4y ago
I don't like this at all. The thing that bothers me is the UI appearance of authority. If they found a good algorithmic way to add context, apply it to twits themselves. Opaque assertions of authority are a dark pattern. Getting someone's "context" stuck on your words when it's just another person's opinion, but your voice has an origin and their voice is given an authoritative appearance without origin feels bad. It tricks people into being more trusting than they should.
- netfl0 4y ago
  Do you have a specific example where this is tricking people?
  - Spivak 4y ago
    It’s not tricking people on purpose but it’s trying to distill information that can’t be distilled. > true but grossly misleading statement said specifically to capitalize on the wrong conclusion people will make about it. > - Every Politician Fact Checker: “seems legit”
    - netfl0 4y ago
      Did you have an issue with Twitter adding the ”context”, based on their delegated authority’s opinion, to tweets prior to this?
      - Spivak 4y ago
        Assuming we’re in a world where fact checking by the platform in some capacity makes sense then this then this feels like the right way to do it. Another way would letting fact checking by an extension of the report feature where you can say, “woah this needs some context” and write a reply or link to your article discussing the issue. And the Twitter moderators just decide whether to show it in the privileged spot with attribution. Bonus if the moderators can highlight a person’s credentials if they happen to be an expert in the topic or directly related to the events.
presentation 4y ago
I’m not a crypto fan but spitballing here: what if it were tokenized? Not necessarily in a distributed blockchain sort of way, after all this is Twitter which is centralized, but rather in terms of setting economic incentives for making good moderation judgements, eg when you make a judgment you stake something of value (money, tokens, reputation, whatever) and set up some mechanism such that making “bad” moderation judgments is an expensive choice. Seems like this is a scenario where there is low levels of trust and therefore can use the thinking of a similarly low-trust domain (crypto).
- twodave 4y ago
  Isn’t that how most political ads/disinformation campaigns already work? Many absolute truths in politics are self-evident, but if you need to get some lies out there… buy some ads.
- dekervin 4y ago
  Hey I can't resist showing what I am working on: https://datum.alwaysdata.net https://datum.alwaysdata.net . The goal is not that far from what birdwatch wants to do, but it's restricted to adding data context to online discourse. I am frequently pondering those kind of thoughts regarding, low trust and crypto. And I would love to discuss it with you, or other people, if you are interested. Basically the design dilemna is you want to anchor the moderating behavior to some hard identity or value, without ruining the collaborative spirit task.
- specialist 4y ago
  Enabling authenticated identity online (personas) is an objectively good thing. Authenticity is a precondition for most of modern life; small things like payments, driver's licenses, voting, education, employment, surgery. Alas, the $8/mo blue check is not that. Payment method is the only verification. No further effort is made. (Please correct me as Musk's answers change.) Instead, the blue check is nothing more than flare. Twitter's pivot towards freemium, gacha, and ultimately Freemium Speeches™ (pay-to-say) could work. There are precedents. Vanity press and academic journals, for instance. And I can envision a substack, medium, or twitter that enables a marketplace for value added services. Fact checking, copyediting, visual design, and so forth. An Upwork for content producers. Alas, I doubt that's Musk's vision for Twitter. For that, I recommend historian Jill Lepore's podcast The Evening Rocket. https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/elon-musk-the-evening-rocket https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/elon-musk-the-evening-rocket Spoiler: With the purchase of Twitter.com, Musk is likely rejuvenating his original goal for X.com.
keewee7 4y ago
>Birdwatch doesn’t work by majority rules. To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, Birdwatch ratings requires agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings. This means the political fringes get to decide what is truth. The far-left and far-right disagree on many things but also agree on many things that are bad for the rest of society. Until very recently the anti-EU sentiment in many European countries was high among both the far-left and far-right.
esskay 4y ago
Whats the betting this gets canned pretty quickly. Musk just fired all the teams responsible for ethics, accessibility, accountability, fact checking, content curation, etc. Not just made them smaller - totally removed anyone involved with them.
- mrits 4y ago
  He literally didn't though. https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/1588657227035918337 https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/1588657227035918337
twodave 4y ago
It is my belief that any fact checking system based on consensus and not actual factual evidence will eventually result in an echo chamber. What’s the value of homogenizing a community down to just the voices that agree with you?
- naasking 4y ago
  Depends how you define "consensus". If two people who disagree on most things agree on X, then arguably we can have more confidence that X is true. There is no left-right divide on whether the sky is blue, for instance.
  - twodave 4y ago
    We both know that this will be applied against will be applied universally to more nuanced scenarios than that. It shouldn’t be. More often the “fact-check” is synonymous with “what we know based on publicly-available information” than what is objectively true (or, as more often is the issue, what is untrue). This basically rules out anyone from being able to credibly whistleblow/call attention to something known only by a few that would be incendiary if it became widely known. Knowing and proving are often in different arenas, and I don’t think constraining conversation to only facts that can be checked is helpful for genuine discourse.
    - naasking 4y ago
      I don't think this constrains the conversations that can happen on Twitter, so much as adding "context" to any conversation. The context that something is not provable using publicly available information although some people claim to know it's factual status is also valuable, and I agree this nuance would ideally be available in that "context".
juujian 4y ago
This can so easily be gamed...
BryantD 4y ago
I put around 15 minutes a day into Birdwatch for a couple of months before the purchase was finalized. This is purely anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt. The requirement for agreement seemed to work well at preventing weird factchecks from anywhere on the political spectrum. I saw a fair number of people trying to use Birdwatch to argue with each other, bad faith factchecks, and so on. None of them made it to general visibility. I wrote 45 notes. I tried very hard to keep them unbiased, but I'm human and I have strong political opinions. 5 of them wound up approved. I suspect the requirement for agreement tended to keep anything that's more than a little divisive from getting approved; no evidence for this, though. I'd be curious to know what the average percentage was for active users. There are way more Birdwatch notes getting written right now. A lot of them are terrible quality. However, they mostly aren't getting approved, so I think the system is working as designed.
- eloff 4y ago
  It's a really smart idea. Look for agreement between people who often disagree as a signal of truth. Like you point out, it's probably a stronger signal of less divisive, less polarizing info than truth. But still decentralized and not biased right or left (biased center, effectively.) I think it will only work if they can keep the bots out. Otherwise it will be gamed like everything else.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - martinlaz 4y ago
      I agree with your point, just to add a little detail to your example- USSR & Co called themselves “socialist”. They considered socialism to be an imperfect intermediate state en route to communism.
    - microjim 4y ago
      ‘Horrible’ epistemology is a bit harsh (signal = approximate measure rather than direct), but this is indeed a valid loophole. Would be interesting to explore if third or fourth groups that do not benefit from the mutually agreed lie could feasibly counter this.
ece 4y ago
Here are some of the fact checks (login required): https://twitter.com/i/birdwatch/rated_helpful https://twitter.com/i/birdwatch/rated_helpful
jmull 4y ago
This seems practically useless for high-profile issues where people will make the effort to manipulate the system. As it states, it's not direct majority rules, but it requires the bulk of the raters to be people acting like people. Bots and brigades won't have a problem adding their desired notes.
petilon 4y ago
Related story: Musk got a note attached to his tweet removed. Edit: but now it is back. "After new Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted a complaint about losing advertisers on the platform Friday, a note offering additional context was added to his tweet, before it later disappeared." https://www.semafor.com/article/11/04/2022/birdwatch-note-disappears-from-elon-musks-tweet https://www.semafor.com/article/11/04/2022/birdwatch-note-di...
- cdash 4y ago
  I think it is gone again, but after reading the article you linked it makes sense why it is coming and going. "Users are able to vote on whether the fact-checks are helpful or not. They can appear or disappear based on how many people found them to be helpful, Twitter's Vice President of Product Keith Coleman said Friday."
twodave 4y ago
I think what bothers me more than anything is how often even fact-checkers are just wrong. We had a moderator in the last presidential election literally interrupting the president to tell him something wasn’t factually correct, and the moderator was wrong! Fact checking should be reserved for things that are just provably untruthful (i.e. flat earthers and other nonsense). But when only applied in that capacity, it doesn’t really have much value anymore.
blindriver 4y ago
I wonder how this can be brigaded and manipulated. Remember, there are millions of bots out there that can be programmed to do whatever they want. If you can brigade them properly, then it can be manipulated. Maybe that's a part of the $8/month plan that Elon has, make it very expensive to run bots.
- spikels 4y ago
  “Payment verification” is a big part of the rationale behind the $8/mo plan. According to Musk bot accounts on Twitter cost less than a cent to create. This plan increases their cost more than 800X per month. He explained this at an investment conference yesterday. Relevant section here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgQBTo0EUxA&t=2065s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgQBTo0EUxA&t=2065s
KerrAvon 4y ago
…and it’s working as well as you might expect. https://nitter.pussthecat.org/radleybalko/status/1588894104133304323#m https://nitter.pussthecat.org/radleybalko/status/15888941041...
- klabb3 4y ago
  Seems more like a "lies, damn ed lies and statistics" (ie the moderators were duped by not being statisticians) rather than a bad faith argument. That said, I don't get why context is necessary here, isn't this what... The discussion is for?
mikotodomo 4y ago
This is great. So sick of watching influencers tweet blatantly wrong information.
klabb3 4y ago
> Birdwatch works differently than the rest of Twitter. It is not a popularity contest. It aims to find notes that many people from different points of view will find helpful. It takes into account not only how many ratings a note has received, but also whether people who rated it helpful seem to come from different perspectives. I had to read this twice. Is it just me or is this Twitter officially acknowledging the issues with their platform (and by proxy all engagement optimized platforms), the main root cause and a solution in the same paragraph? And then proceeds to launch it only for a minor sub-feature of the platform as a whole?
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  Seems correct and reasonable. When it comes to fact checking, they optimize for group satisfaction and consensus. For general content, they optimize for individual satisfaction/engagement.
puyoxyz 4y ago
> Twitter doesn’t choose what shows up, the people do > > Twitter doesn’t write, rate or moderate notes (unless they break the Twitter rules.) We believe giving people a voice to make these choices together is a fair and effective way to add information that helps people stay better informed. Well, this isn’t true anymore. There was a birdwatch note on one of Elons tweets that got removed. And it wasn’t removed by the people, because in the Birdwatch UI it still said “this note was voted helpful and is showing on the tweet”. Here’s a picture of the note before it was removed: https://twitter.com/goldman/status/1588576046743687170?s=46&t=AwU-i2h4hDqClubP8G4H_w https://twitter.com/goldman/status/1588576046743687170?s=46&... I couldn’t find the picture of the Birdwatch UI showing it’s still helpful and showing on the tweet when it wasn’t :( If anyone really wants it, reply and I’ll look more, I probably have it in my likes
- drdrey 4y ago
  The thread you linked to does in fact explain that it is behaving as expected, powered by Birdwatch contributors
  - puyoxyz 4y ago
    There was like a few hours where it showed up as Helpful and showing on the tweet on Birdwatch (I saw like two or three separate screenshots of it) but not showing on the actual tweet, so I’m not entirely convinced
    - fernandotakai 4y ago
      here's keith coleman (twitter's vp of product) explaining why sometimes notes disappear: https://twitter.com/kcoleman/status/1588596686477459457 https://twitter.com/kcoleman/status/1588596686477459457 and here's a screenshot of a MORE helpful note that got added https://twitter.com/stevanzetti/status/1588896632547905540 https://twitter.com/stevanzetti/status/1588896632547905540
      - tsol 4y ago

373 points by mcint 4y ago

Birdwatch is a collaborative way to add helpful context to Tweets and keep people better informed Birdwatch is a pilot program that aims to create a better-informed world. It empowers people on Twitter to collaboratively add helpful notes to Tweets that might be misleading. https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch https://twitter.com/birdwatch https://twitter.com/birdwatch

fazfq 4y ago
"empowers" is such a red flag in my book...
- Eupraxias 4y ago
  Sounds like its time for a new book, but you don't have to take my word for it...
  - aksss 4y ago
    Or stop using rhetorical buzzwords and the language of demagoguery.

easytiger 4y ago

Lol. So trivially abusable

theCrowing 4y ago
As it was designed it's all about liability and like this twitter has none.
vntok 4y ago
> To find notes that are helpful to the broadest possible set of people, Birdwatch takes into account not only how many contributors rated a note as helpful or unhelpful, but also whether people who rated it seem to come from different perspectives. > Birdwatch assesses “different perspectives” entirely based on how people have rated notes in the past; Birdwatch does not ask about or use any other information to do this (e.g. demographics like location, gender, or political affiliation, or data from Twitter such as follows or Tweets). This is based on the intuition that Contributors who tend to rate the same notes similarly are likely to have more similar perspectives while contributors who rate notes differently are likely to have different perspectives. If people who typically disagree in their ratings agree that a given note is helpful, it’s probably a good indicator the note is helpful to people from different points of view. https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/diversity-of-perspectives/ https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/diversity-of-perspective...
- easytiger 4y ago
  and?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - vntok 4y ago
    How would you trivially abuse this?
    - easytiger 4y ago
      > but also whether people who rated it seem to come from different perspectives. How do you achieve that?
      - vntok 4y ago
        It was explained in the paragraph immediately below the sentence you quoted. Here it is again: > Birdwatch assesses “different perspectives” entirely based on how people have rated notes in the past; Birdwatch does not ask about or use any other information to do this (e.g. demographics like location, gender, or political affiliation, or data from Twitter such as follows or Tweets). This is based on the intuition that Contributors who tend to rate the same notes similarly are likely to have more similar perspectives while contributors who rate notes differently are likely to have different perspectives. If people who typically disagree in their ratings agree that a given note is helpful, it’s probably a good indicator the note is helpful to people from different points of view. https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/diversity-of-perspectives/ https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/diversity-of-perspective...

Hamuko 4y ago

I'm afraid of what every single political tweet will look like now.

dbbk 4y ago
This has been around for ages, it's not new
dandanua 4y ago
https://twitter.com/wallstmemes/status/1586409344395976704 https://twitter.com/wallstmemes/status/1586409344395976704 People who lie the most will "fact check" their opponents.
vntok 4y ago
This is a feature.

alex23478 4y ago

Just to make sure I didn't miss anything: They're not paying anyone for their fact-checking?

fazfq 4y ago
Isn't putting whatever you want next to a popular guy's tweets enough payment?
neura 4y ago
I mean... they don't pay anybody for it, or actually have any sort of fact-checking right now... and they're still one of the most dominant cessp... err, social media sites.
melbourne_mat 4y ago
How to save some cash: 1. Fire your staff, 2. outsource their work to the general public. Brilliant! But seriously folks: Twitter is rubbish. Find something more useful to do with your time.
- vntok 4y ago
  > How to save some cash: 1. Fire your staff, 2. outsource their work to the general public. Brilliant! What are you talking about? This program has existed at Twitter for years.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > How to save some cash: 1. Fire your staff, 2. outsource their work to the general public. Brilliant! Imagine this as a sarcastic comment about why a country shouldn't move from a monarchy to a republic.
veidr 4y ago
This particular technology initiative does appear to be an effort to build a system that harnesses unpaid volunteers as fact-checkers. However, according to today's front-page Washington Post[1] article, they are also still paying people in the "Trust & Safety" department, to do jobs including fact-checking (and presumably acting on fact-checking done by other humans, and possibly trained-model automated fact-checkers as well). From what I can understand, the company was recently purchased by an oligarch, who then implemented massive staff cuts of around 50% generally across the board, but the "Trust & Safety" department had a lower level of layoffs, at around 15%. So human staff is apparently still involved in fact-checking, aside from the system described here. It seems likely that fact-checking on a global "social media" network would necessarily involve various approaches and multiple layers to be effective, so the core idea of this system seems worth trying. However, it is a difficult problem, with powerful financial and political incentives for various parties to game such a system, it will be interesting to see if this ever yields results, and if so, what those results are. [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/05/twitter-layoffs-election-impact/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/05/twitter...

saurik 4y ago

Prior discussions with comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25906672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25906672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25908439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25908439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25906775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25906775 An article arguing for a different UI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25935407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25935407 Discussion from yesterday on a thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474196 In that final discussion SilasX noted: > Interesting, I remember someone on /r/slatestarcodex having the idea to rate/sort reddit comments by that metric, which I dub "sort by should-be-uncontroversial" (because normally-disagreeing people all think it's correct). Honestly, that sorting mechanism sounds sane to me? It certainly sounds a lot saner than optimizing for engaging content (which seems to result in arguments), but I would guess is a lot less profitable (and so likely won't happen). But like, in a world where informative comments actually were sorted highly, wouldn't that mostly obviate the need for this notes / fact checking system in the first place? Put differently, isn't the very existence of and interest in this second system for voting on content attached to a tweet a demonstration that the primary system (for sorting replies, which are merely content attached to a tweet) sucks?

highwaylights 4y ago
This might be the one real value proposition to come out of all of this (if there is one). Part of the scoring metric is awarding more weight to historically diaposed views. Bold strategy, let’s see if it pans out for them Cotton etc. At worst it stays a cesspool, but maybe we find a way to (shock horror) promote actual civil discourse on the Internet.
maeil 4y ago
Such a scoring mechanism sounds useful at first but on websites like Reddit it would likely cause puns, cultural references and such to be even more dominant than they already are, as those are most likely to be similarly appreciated by "normally-disagreeing people". I could only see it add much value on heavily moderated/high-effort sites like HN, where there's much less need for it in the first place.

theCrowing 4y ago

Who watches the Birdwatchers? Joke aside that's an experiment I can appreciate at least it will show us how bot invested and deranged twitter and it's users really are. I actually thought it was launched months ago..

plazmatic 4y ago
thinkingemote 4y ago
You can download all the data apparently, so you could watch the birdwatchers! However although users get a permanent id it's not possible to get actual Twitter handles from these ids. So identification of who the birdwatchers are is not easy (wisely so)!
altacc 4y ago
From the page: "We believe regular people can valuably contribute to identifying and adding helpful context to potentially misleading information." That'll end well! ;) Problem is that on Twitter people aren't "regular", they're either seeking their own echo chamber for confirmation bias or the opposing echo chamber to insult, so crowd sourced feedback will simply be used as a tool for either of those.
- davedx 4y ago
  I dunno, Wikipedia is 100% based on regular contributors and it's turned out exceptionally well
  - blitzar 4y ago
    Wikipedia is not for profit, twitter is.
  - insickness 4y ago
    It doesn't work for controversial topics.
  - 4y ago

uri4 4y ago

It is centralised and only for US. I am not going to participate on any platform that is not decentralised, federated and zero trust. In past I put a lot of effort into various forums. Well sourced information, several thousands hours of work. But very ofter it was all wasted, wiped and deleted. Now I only write books. There are well established censorship laws. And work I put into writing book will be preserved!

fredgrott 4y ago
ahem you do already, it's called the internet! Maybe you forgot internet is not decentralized.
- threeseed 4y ago
  Actually the internet is decentralised. It's just that a lot of people either don't know or simply aren't willing to trade convenience for ideological purity. Anybody can run a web server at home, get a domain name, write a Twitter clone, host it and publish whatever content they like. And when you exceed your traffic limits you can take that web server, drive to your local co-located provider and in almost all cases they will let you grow that site almost ad infinitum provided the content isn't illegal. You don't need to ask permission. You don't need to compromise your ideology. You can just do it. But people don't want freedom or decentralisation. What they want is the ability to say anything they like and for everyone to hear it.
  - nunobrito 4y ago
    So the "actshually" meme comes true. Instead of reddit-style legalisms, just try to be more human and understand their perspective for a change. People do have the desire and right to ask for mainstream platforms to be decentralized. Is it feasible today? Technically: yes, realistically: no. Why? Because even MORE people are needed to effectively demand the right for mainstream platforms to be decentralized. You know that. Now be nice to them, please.
    - deleted 4y ago

xiphias2 4y ago

While I agree with most of the comments that it can be easily abused, if the bots can be kicked out, this (trying to get rid of echo chambers and highlighting posts from people with different viewpoints recognized by the algorithm) would be a better way for all social media to work than what we have now. In the current situation (showing most liked posts) the only common ground is good looking people (TikTok/Instagram/Youtube shorts) and most outraging posts with lies to get more likes (Twitter/Youtube)

ceres 4y ago
> this (trying to get rid of echo chambers and highlighting posts from people with different viewpoints recognized by the algorithm) would be a better But people _want_ echo chambers. No one wants to be in a group where people share opinions that they dislike. It’s just human nature. Why do you think private Facebook groups are so popular?
- pjc50 4y ago
  The other day I saw "Trending in Sports: The Jews" on the Twitter trending topics page. I do not want to see that. Maybe we need the "echo chambers are better than gas chambers" slogan.
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    The reason echo chambers are dangerous is precisely because of the lack of dissent. Imagine politics is little more than a math problem. The actual answer is 0, but one group insists the answer can't be any smaller than 43, and another group insists there's no way it can be large than -51. Split these two groups off on their own, and they're just going to diverge more and more. Those in the bigger group will flaunt their in-group virtue by insisting on ever large numbers, and vice versa for those in the other group. They will diverge further and further from reality, but bring them together and the two sides help keep other in check. Getting back to real history, the Nazis were never notably popular. Their best result in anything like a fair election was in 1932 where they took 37% of the vote [1]. They managed to get an enabling act passed by political maneuvering, not genuine popularity. At that point they created an artificial echo chamber, and the rest is history. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_1932_German_federal_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_1932_German_federal_elect...

samwillis 4y ago

For important context, this isn't new (it started a couple of years ago I believe), and has not been introduced by the new owner. It is not related to outsourcing work to unpaid volunteers that was previously done by paid employees who have been made redundant during the layoffs over the last few days.

blitzar 4y ago
> this isn't new (it started a couple of years ago I believe) 4 CEOs have supported this project ... so far.
- cpach 4y ago
  Huh! Never heard of it before.
aaron695 4y ago
> done by paid employees who have been made redundant Could you cite this. I'm not saying you are a liar pushing misinformation, but it's fair and important that you link the proof I think. For instance we know Keith Coleman wasn't sacked and Musk said the project is awesome https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587798343622737925 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587798343622737925 so your fact is surprising. We should be able to read for ourselves. Especially if we tell other people this information it allows us to link back. A chain of facts. If you know it personally, that also gives us context.
- sgerenser 4y ago
  Poster you’re replying to said it’s not replacing work done by paid, now laid off, employees.
  - iinnPP 4y ago
    It is worded in a way that 'can' imply that there has been a switch from paid worker to unpaid volunteer. 'it is not related to X' suggests that X exists in order to be the subject of such a relation.

est 4y ago

the most strange part is it's hosted on Github Really, a for-profit company can't host some static pages properly under its own domain.

CSDude 4y ago
I thought the exact same thing. But then I noticed some code is also open-source. https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch/tree/main/static/sourcecode https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch/tree/main/static/source...

oxff 4y ago

"Collaborative fact check" really does show that there is a demarcation between "fact" and "truth".

jbverschoor 4y ago

So who's paying for free 'collaborative' research work? I guess it'll pay about $8 month

codyogden 4y ago
No no no. You see? If you want to be a Birdwatch contributor, you'll have to pay them. /s It's actually pretty okay. The contributor & rating system seems to work well, and contributions are anonymous. I participate mostly through rating contributions a little here and there when I see some things that are wildly unfounded or misleading claims.
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  I dunno.. I think I'd go crazy with all the BS being posted these days.. It would probably make me wanna walk off of the edge of the earth.

jb1991 4y ago

Hi, birdwatcher here. I resent the implication that the time honored tradition and enjoyment one gets from watching birds could be used as a metaphor for adjudicating the integrity of bad actors on social media. One is a graceful reflection on the pristine experience of being alive, the other is a form of policing bad behavior. It is a shame they had to soil such a worthy endeavor as birdwatching with this name.

joelrunyon 4y ago
Twitterati would have been a much more apt/fun name.
- christophilus 4y ago
  Twaughtpolice?
  - HlessClaudesman 4y ago
    Twat Police?
    - z9znz 4y ago
      Hi. Twatwatcher and lover here. I resent the implication that a twat is a bad thing which need policing. Yeah, one meaning of the word is synonymous with "fool", but let's not encourage overloading the word since one of the meanings is related to that which is necessary for human life (and is also quite fun) with stupid human behavior.
      - sfmike 4y ago
        Ironically It's an implication that something of which is policed is a bad thing.
      - HlessClaudesman 4y ago
        In my experience, having lived in a few English speaking countries, "twat" is commonly understood as a fool, whereas it's derivative "twot" can be used to describe either a fool or for female genitalia. So given this distinction, I am very much pro twot but anti twat. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twat

DeathArrow 4y ago

Fact checking systems can be and are gamed. I rather have the plain content and let everyone decide if it is true or false.

vntok 4y ago
There isn't enough time in a no-sleep 24h day to verify every single piece of content one is reading/hearing online that same day. Just go to any major news site's homepage; there's at least 40 articles there, plus videos. Count the number of tweets or instas you're glancing upon on your feed, they're infinitely loading below your thumbs. Self-service fact-checking is not scalable.
- mistermann 4y ago
  > There isn't enough time in a no-sleep 24h day to verify every single piece of content one is reading/hearing online that same day. If it was necessary to fact check every tweet, this would be a big problem. Luckily though, that is not a requirement. With a proper implementation, it should be reasonably easy to surface a historic list of (a subset of) any given user's incorrect statements, which provides objective evidence to distrust someone's claims and opinions. With the style of epistemology practiced by most people in 2022, everyone is going to have black marks on their history. And if we had a cultural change as a consequence of this, people might start putting some effort into speaking in the form of true statements. > Just go to any major news site's homepage; there's at least 40 articles there, plus videos. Count the number of tweets or instas you're glancing upon on your feed, they're infinitely loading below your thumbs. Establish a persistent and centralized list of well fact checked "untruths" (rhetoric, innuendo, etc) from popular media outlets, and we will then have undeniable evidence that can be easily referenced, making common claims that mainstream media is ~"not that bad" transparently false. > Self-service fact-checking is not scalable. There is an important difference between scalability and infinite scalability. If Elon is smart, this feature could be a very big problem for belief shapers.

RootKitBeerCat 4y ago

Crowdsourcing content moderation always turns out real well

rvba 4y ago

How does it prevent an organized group of trolls who maek everything as "true". Or everyrhing from a source as "false"? Does it have some sort of a "raid" prevention? What about sleeper accounts made earlier to abuse this system?

pluc 4y ago

So they went the Reddit way: free labour.

iinnPP 4y ago
Any company taking user content for profit is doing the same. Including this website.

z9znz 4y ago

I'm skeptical that using a wikipedia-like approach will work for small, essentially ephemeral content. There's just not enough time to debate each tweet, especially now that so many people (with large followings) tweet so much debatable content frequently. There's probably also not enough interest... or the interest and fascination with moderating will wane quickly (fatique). Reading the various recent news items about Twitter, one would think that Musk was trying to revert the company to a crowdsource startup. I don't think that's possible, at least not without shedding a great many of the users. Of course, I also think the entire system and premise behind Twitter is bunk, so it doesn't really matter.

mistermann 4y ago
I don't think there's necessarily a need to fact check every tweet. If fact checks are maintained in a list, and one can navigate from a user account to their position in the list which also shows their past history of fact checked falsehoods/untruthfulness/lying, it could make a difference. I think the general public is intelligent enough to start to come up with strategies to target the most influential people (politicians, journalists, activists, celebrities, etc) and work down from there. Of course, fact checking is a complicated skill, but people can learn new skills. The public learning new skills on social media on an ongoing basis may be problematic for some people, but it could be very healthy for the overall ecosystem.

jengland 4y ago

Does anyone here know how it works and thinks it can be easily abused? The paper is here[0], but I would be satisfied with an explanation from anyone who just generally knows what "bridge-based ranking"[1] is. I'm pretty excited about the idea and I wonder if people mostly just don't know or if I am being too optimistic. [0]: https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch/blob/main/birdwatch_paper_2022_10_27.pdf https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch/blob/main/birdwatch_pap... [1]: https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/bridging-based-ranking https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/bridging-based-rank...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ShredKazoo 4y ago
I think this problem is similar to fighting spam, or ranking webpages for search queries: you don't want to be too public with your methods, because any metric can be gamed. I actually suspect "bridge-based ranking" has already been deployed on a large scale, and the group that did so has not publicly disclosed this -- likely for good reason. (There is a big social media site that used to be famous for having terrible comments. You fill in the rest...) In any case, yes it is very exciting. Including from an epistemological point of view -- the idea of promoting arguments that actually change someone's mind is pretty cool (assuming the argument is sound and truthful).
BryantD 4y ago
The source code is also in that repo, so easy enough to dig into it. Harder to form a useful opinion, at least for me.
shakna 4y ago
The greatest weakness in the scoring system [0] that I can see is age. There is a requirement for valid scoring to occur within 48 hours. > Made within the first 48 hours of the note’s creation (because we publicly release all rating data after 48 hours) [1] However, in the real world, our understanding of a message's context may actually take much longer than that. Especially when more information can come to light, that changes the landscape. The second greatest weakness I see is that rater's with a lower mean are automatically filtered. Whilst you can discuss using APIs to do it, if you have large groups of individuals dedicated to promoting specific viewpoints, you can utilise that manpower to de-rate anyone promoting an opposing view by ruining their helpfulness average. That makes the system easily abused by highly motivated political factions, especially foreign ones that admit to employing large groups of people for such a purpose. > Their rater helpfulness score must be at least 0.66 [1] [0] https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch/blob/main/static/sourcecode/helpfulness_scores.py https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch/blob/main/static/source... [1] https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/contributor-scores/#valid-ratings https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/contributor-scores/#vali...

hristov 4y ago

So if it is, on one hand, "collaborative" and it expects people to work for free, and on the other hand there is apparently so much value in putting misinformation on twitter, wouldn't most people that work on that be paid by the various parties that want to put misinformation on twitter? You know how amazon reviews are collaborative and volunteer based and 99% of them are made for money and are easily spotted lies.

baxtr 4y ago
Easy. We just need a collaborative fact checking system for the collaborative fact checking system.
vntok 4y ago
Paying some of those people to manipulate reviews wouldn't really work at scale. See here how Twitter automatically ranks reviews: https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/diversity-of-perspectives/ https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/diversity-of-perspective... > To find notes that are helpful to the broadest possible set of people, Birdwatch takes into account not only how many contributors rated a note as helpful or unhelpful, but also whether people who rated it seem to come from different perspectives. > Birdwatch assesses “different perspectives” entirely based on how people have rated notes in the past; Birdwatch does not ask about or use any other information to do this (e.g. demographics like location, gender, or political affiliation, or data from Twitter such as follows or Tweets). This is based on the intuition that Contributors who tend to rate the same notes similarly are likely to have more similar perspectives while contributors who rate notes differently are likely to have different perspectives.

lifeisstillgood 4y ago

Isn't this ... science for everyday things? I'm fascinated by the idea that we have enabled everyone to talk to everyone else and now have to find ways to agree on, what are and are not facts, what is and is not "acceptable". Eons ago we old buffers dreamed of a new world online - a virtual world. And we built it. And it has the same problems and we are trying to find almost the same solutions - but they fit differently. And there is opportunity- to share wealth and knowledge and spread out power. It should be a more democratic world. Virtually.

machina_ex_deus 4y ago

I don't like this at all. The thing that bothers me is the UI appearance of authority. If they found a good algorithmic way to add context, apply it to twits themselves. Opaque assertions of authority are a dark pattern. Getting someone's "context" stuck on your words when it's just another person's opinion, but your voice has an origin and their voice is given an authoritative appearance without origin feels bad. It tricks people into being more trusting than they should.

netfl0 4y ago
Do you have a specific example where this is tricking people?
- Spivak 4y ago
  It’s not tricking people on purpose but it’s trying to distill information that can’t be distilled. > true but grossly misleading statement said specifically to capitalize on the wrong conclusion people will make about it. > - Every Politician Fact Checker: “seems legit”
  - netfl0 4y ago
    Did you have an issue with Twitter adding the ”context”, based on their delegated authority’s opinion, to tweets prior to this?
    - Spivak 4y ago
      Assuming we’re in a world where fact checking by the platform in some capacity makes sense then this then this feels like the right way to do it. Another way would letting fact checking by an extension of the report feature where you can say, “woah this needs some context” and write a reply or link to your article discussing the issue. And the Twitter moderators just decide whether to show it in the privileged spot with attribution. Bonus if the moderators can highlight a person’s credentials if they happen to be an expert in the topic or directly related to the events.

presentation 4y ago

I’m not a crypto fan but spitballing here: what if it were tokenized? Not necessarily in a distributed blockchain sort of way, after all this is Twitter which is centralized, but rather in terms of setting economic incentives for making good moderation judgements, eg when you make a judgment you stake something of value (money, tokens, reputation, whatever) and set up some mechanism such that making “bad” moderation judgments is an expensive choice. Seems like this is a scenario where there is low levels of trust and therefore can use the thinking of a similarly low-trust domain (crypto).

twodave 4y ago
Isn’t that how most political ads/disinformation campaigns already work? Many absolute truths in politics are self-evident, but if you need to get some lies out there… buy some ads.
dekervin 4y ago
Hey I can't resist showing what I am working on: https://datum.alwaysdata.net https://datum.alwaysdata.net . The goal is not that far from what birdwatch wants to do, but it's restricted to adding data context to online discourse. I am frequently pondering those kind of thoughts regarding, low trust and crypto. And I would love to discuss it with you, or other people, if you are interested. Basically the design dilemna is you want to anchor the moderating behavior to some hard identity or value, without ruining the collaborative spirit task.
specialist 4y ago
Enabling authenticated identity online (personas) is an objectively good thing. Authenticity is a precondition for most of modern life; small things like payments, driver's licenses, voting, education, employment, surgery. Alas, the $8/mo blue check is not that. Payment method is the only verification. No further effort is made. (Please correct me as Musk's answers change.) Instead, the blue check is nothing more than flare. Twitter's pivot towards freemium, gacha, and ultimately Freemium Speeches™ (pay-to-say) could work. There are precedents. Vanity press and academic journals, for instance. And I can envision a substack, medium, or twitter that enables a marketplace for value added services. Fact checking, copyediting, visual design, and so forth. An Upwork for content producers. Alas, I doubt that's Musk's vision for Twitter. For that, I recommend historian Jill Lepore's podcast The Evening Rocket. https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/elon-musk-the-evening-rocket https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/elon-musk-the-evening-rocket Spoiler: With the purchase of Twitter.com, Musk is likely rejuvenating his original goal for X.com.

keewee7 4y ago

>Birdwatch doesn’t work by majority rules. To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, Birdwatch ratings requires agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings. This means the political fringes get to decide what is truth. The far-left and far-right disagree on many things but also agree on many things that are bad for the rest of society. Until very recently the anti-EU sentiment in many European countries was high among both the far-left and far-right.

esskay 4y ago

Whats the betting this gets canned pretty quickly. Musk just fired all the teams responsible for ethics, accessibility, accountability, fact checking, content curation, etc. Not just made them smaller - totally removed anyone involved with them.

mrits 4y ago
He literally didn't though. https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/1588657227035918337 https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/1588657227035918337

twodave 4y ago

It is my belief that any fact checking system based on consensus and not actual factual evidence will eventually result in an echo chamber. What’s the value of homogenizing a community down to just the voices that agree with you?

naasking 4y ago
Depends how you define "consensus". If two people who disagree on most things agree on X, then arguably we can have more confidence that X is true. There is no left-right divide on whether the sky is blue, for instance.
- twodave 4y ago
  We both know that this will be applied against will be applied universally to more nuanced scenarios than that. It shouldn’t be. More often the “fact-check” is synonymous with “what we know based on publicly-available information” than what is objectively true (or, as more often is the issue, what is untrue). This basically rules out anyone from being able to credibly whistleblow/call attention to something known only by a few that would be incendiary if it became widely known. Knowing and proving are often in different arenas, and I don’t think constraining conversation to only facts that can be checked is helpful for genuine discourse.
  - naasking 4y ago
    I don't think this constrains the conversations that can happen on Twitter, so much as adding "context" to any conversation. The context that something is not provable using publicly available information although some people claim to know it's factual status is also valuable, and I agree this nuance would ideally be available in that "context".

juujian 4y ago

This can so easily be gamed...

BryantD 4y ago

I put around 15 minutes a day into Birdwatch for a couple of months before the purchase was finalized. This is purely anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt. The requirement for agreement seemed to work well at preventing weird factchecks from anywhere on the political spectrum. I saw a fair number of people trying to use Birdwatch to argue with each other, bad faith factchecks, and so on. None of them made it to general visibility. I wrote 45 notes. I tried very hard to keep them unbiased, but I'm human and I have strong political opinions. 5 of them wound up approved. I suspect the requirement for agreement tended to keep anything that's more than a little divisive from getting approved; no evidence for this, though. I'd be curious to know what the average percentage was for active users. There are way more Birdwatch notes getting written right now. A lot of them are terrible quality. However, they mostly aren't getting approved, so I think the system is working as designed.

eloff 4y ago
It's a really smart idea. Look for agreement between people who often disagree as a signal of truth. Like you point out, it's probably a stronger signal of less divisive, less polarizing info than truth. But still decentralized and not biased right or left (biased center, effectively.) I think it will only work if they can keep the bots out. Otherwise it will be gamed like everything else.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - martinlaz 4y ago
    I agree with your point, just to add a little detail to your example- USSR & Co called themselves “socialist”. They considered socialism to be an imperfect intermediate state en route to communism.
  - microjim 4y ago
    ‘Horrible’ epistemology is a bit harsh (signal = approximate measure rather than direct), but this is indeed a valid loophole. Would be interesting to explore if third or fourth groups that do not benefit from the mutually agreed lie could feasibly counter this.

ece 4y ago

Here are some of the fact checks (login required): https://twitter.com/i/birdwatch/rated_helpful https://twitter.com/i/birdwatch/rated_helpful

jmull 4y ago

This seems practically useless for high-profile issues where people will make the effort to manipulate the system. As it states, it's not direct majority rules, but it requires the bulk of the raters to be people acting like people. Bots and brigades won't have a problem adding their desired notes.

petilon 4y ago

Related story: Musk got a note attached to his tweet removed. Edit: but now it is back. "After new Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted a complaint about losing advertisers on the platform Friday, a note offering additional context was added to his tweet, before it later disappeared." https://www.semafor.com/article/11/04/2022/birdwatch-note-disappears-from-elon-musks-tweet https://www.semafor.com/article/11/04/2022/birdwatch-note-di...

cdash 4y ago
I think it is gone again, but after reading the article you linked it makes sense why it is coming and going. "Users are able to vote on whether the fact-checks are helpful or not. They can appear or disappear based on how many people found them to be helpful, Twitter's Vice President of Product Keith Coleman said Friday."

twodave 4y ago

I think what bothers me more than anything is how often even fact-checkers are just wrong. We had a moderator in the last presidential election literally interrupting the president to tell him something wasn’t factually correct, and the moderator was wrong! Fact checking should be reserved for things that are just provably untruthful (i.e. flat earthers and other nonsense). But when only applied in that capacity, it doesn’t really have much value anymore.

blindriver 4y ago

I wonder how this can be brigaded and manipulated. Remember, there are millions of bots out there that can be programmed to do whatever they want. If you can brigade them properly, then it can be manipulated. Maybe that's a part of the $8/month plan that Elon has, make it very expensive to run bots.

spikels 4y ago
“Payment verification” is a big part of the rationale behind the $8/mo plan. According to Musk bot accounts on Twitter cost less than a cent to create. This plan increases their cost more than 800X per month. He explained this at an investment conference yesterday. Relevant section here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgQBTo0EUxA&t=2065s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgQBTo0EUxA&t=2065s

KerrAvon 4y ago

…and it’s working as well as you might expect. https://nitter.pussthecat.org/radleybalko/status/1588894104133304323#m https://nitter.pussthecat.org/radleybalko/status/15888941041...

klabb3 4y ago
Seems more like a "lies, damn ed lies and statistics" (ie the moderators were duped by not being statisticians) rather than a bad faith argument. That said, I don't get why context is necessary here, isn't this what... The discussion is for?

mikotodomo 4y ago

This is great. So sick of watching influencers tweet blatantly wrong information.

klabb3 4y ago

> Birdwatch works differently than the rest of Twitter. It is not a popularity contest. It aims to find notes that many people from different points of view will find helpful. It takes into account not only how many ratings a note has received, but also whether people who rated it helpful seem to come from different perspectives. I had to read this twice. Is it just me or is this Twitter officially acknowledging the issues with their platform (and by proxy all engagement optimized platforms), the main root cause and a solution in the same paragraph? And then proceeds to launch it only for a minor sub-feature of the platform as a whole?

s1artibartfast 4y ago
Seems correct and reasonable. When it comes to fact checking, they optimize for group satisfaction and consensus. For general content, they optimize for individual satisfaction/engagement.

puyoxyz 4y ago

> Twitter doesn’t choose what shows up, the people do > > Twitter doesn’t write, rate or moderate notes (unless they break the Twitter rules.) We believe giving people a voice to make these choices together is a fair and effective way to add information that helps people stay better informed. Well, this isn’t true anymore. There was a birdwatch note on one of Elons tweets that got removed. And it wasn’t removed by the people, because in the Birdwatch UI it still said “this note was voted helpful and is showing on the tweet”. Here’s a picture of the note before it was removed: https://twitter.com/goldman/status/1588576046743687170?s=46&t=AwU-i2h4hDqClubP8G4H_w https://twitter.com/goldman/status/1588576046743687170?s=46&... I couldn’t find the picture of the Birdwatch UI showing it’s still helpful and showing on the tweet when it wasn’t :( If anyone really wants it, reply and I’ll look more, I probably have it in my likes

drdrey 4y ago
The thread you linked to does in fact explain that it is behaving as expected, powered by Birdwatch contributors
- puyoxyz 4y ago
  There was like a few hours where it showed up as Helpful and showing on the tweet on Birdwatch (I saw like two or three separate screenshots of it) but not showing on the actual tweet, so I’m not entirely convinced
  - fernandotakai 4y ago
    here's keith coleman (twitter's vp of product) explaining why sometimes notes disappear: https://twitter.com/kcoleman/status/1588596686477459457 https://twitter.com/kcoleman/status/1588596686477459457 and here's a screenshot of a MORE helpful note that got added https://twitter.com/stevanzetti/status/1588896632547905540 https://twitter.com/stevanzetti/status/1588896632547905540
    - tsol 4y ago