Birdwatch, a community-based approach to misinformation
blog.twitter.com
blog.twitter.com
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?
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.
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.
I think the idea of finding truth through consensus is the flaw here. A system like this would have silenced the great revolutionary thinkers of history.
Oh, I'm not proposing that truth should be (or can be) defined by consensus, nor does the article.
This might be a decent example of the value of such a system: if someone makes such a proposal (ie: "Truth is defined by consensus."), or if someone asserts that someone else had made such a proposal, rather than the tweet being left as it is allowing the misinformation to propagate through the memeplex and into people's minds (aka: their reality), a formal rebuttal can be attached directly to it (so anyone happening upon can see that a collaborative consensus has been reached that it is plausibly misinformation), which is distinctly different from the tweet being declared(!) as conclusively(!) and unambiguously FALSE.
Sometimes such distinctions are important, sometimes they are not. In this case, the distinction is important, because of an anticipatory line I included in my comment:
> 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".
In this case, you seem to be asserting that this wouldn't work, due to a specific flaw. However, the flaw you point out is not actually valid - I think this is a legitimate demonstration of how crowdsourcing can address a situation where the truth of a matter is "in play"...one person suggests an idea, another person asserts that it cannot work because <X>, another user realizes that <X> is a false statement and points that out. To be clear: this has not rendered the initial tweet to be True (that would be invalid logic), but it has cast significant and valid doubt on the assertion of ~"Viability = False" (because of a specific reason).
I think it wouldn't hurt to maybe have a little primer on the basics of logic embedded somewhere in this process as well - we always talk about how the general public needs improved critical thinking, so why not teach that wherever we can?
I think the general idea behind Birdwatch is plausibly workable and valuable, and using crowdsourcing allows it to scale. Similarly, I believe the general idea behind my idea to ensure that everyone is kept honest is also plausibly workable and valuable (until someone points out a valid reason that it isn't, of course).
> A system like this would have silenced the great revolutionary thinkers of history.
Can you explain your reasoning? I don't see anything in the proposal that suggests an intention to use this for precision or wholesale censorship - in fact, the article explicitly says the exact opposite of your concern:
> Eventually we aim to make notes visible directly on Tweets for the global Twitter audience, when there is consensus from a broad and diverse set of contributors.
> In this first phase of the pilot, notes will only be visible on a separate Birdwatch site. On this site, pilot participants can also rate the helpfulness of notes added by other contributors. These notes are being intentionally kept separate from Twitter for now, while we build Birdwatch and gain confidence that it produces context people find helpful and appropriate. Additionally, notes will not have an effect on the way people see Tweets or our system recommendations.
Are you seeing something here regarding censorship that I'm not?
Similarly, it’s not hard to imagine that if the minority is the one that’s correct, the majority can cause some damage enforcing the belief that the emperor is indeed wearing clothes.
The truth is the thing that needs protection, not speech. The challenge is that objective truth can be epistemologically difficult to protect without protecting lies (or conversely fighting falsehoods can inadvertently end up fighting some truths).
Which is why even lies are, and should be, protected speech, even if that's not the current trendy thought.
Ultimately what it comes down to is: protecting unpopular minority opinions. If they're not protected, how would it even be possible to evaluate the "truth" of the content.
There is no universal truth. That's why everyone's speech should be protected. Even lies.
Consider: Every civil rights achievement made in the last 100 years. If the minority opinion was squelched without a chance to be considered, what progress would have been made?
Would a "Ministry of Truth" in whatever form it might take, have even allowed statements questioning racial or gender equality?
Any system that enforces such censorship becomes a theocracy dictating dogma.
A statement as simple as "There is no god" would become blasphemous again.
It’s the same line of reasoning that prevents public figures from suing people who make fun of them - when you’re a public figure you have an outsized responsibility to the public good.
Maybe Google wave is a better fit, allowing rich non-text items to enter it.
On Twitter you will have each person fight for their side, and you will never see a convergent product.
Of course this answer (and your question) presupposes that we are trying to achieve some form of shared consensus, whereas on Twitter, it is really two or more sides of a culture war fighting and wars are zero or negative sum games. If we are trying to find the truth I benefit even if every theory I had was wrong, because it still helped us get to the one that works, but in a war if I don't win I am sure to lose.
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.
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.).
You're confusing preferences and facts. I was talking about facts [1], you're talking about preferences.
[1] like Donald Trump is not waging a secret war to defeat a conspiracy of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who harvest a (fictitious) drug from trafficked children and Trump lost the 2020 election fairly.
The problem always becomes that few think their faction has this problem. Most people think that they and their side believe in the truth, and that the other side is peddling false information. In such an environment, "combating misinformation" inevitably becomes "trying to get everyone to agree with me."
In order to combat misinformation we'd probably have to start by combating the emotional commitment we hold to a certain narrative before we even examine all of the facts. That's not easy to do, but I imagine a good first step would be to cut out the constant 24/7 news cycle that a lot of people are addicted to and that seems to feed into these emotions. Twitter, of course, is a large source of this stuff.
Getting away from the news is an excellent way to start thinking more clearly.
The problem with your line of thinking is that it assumes good faith and a certain amount of competence, which are assumptions that I don't think we can reasonably make anymore in light of the insane success of things like QAnon and "Stop the Steal."
"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.
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.
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."
What's to stop a flood of Russian accounts gaining control of what's marked as disinformation?
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.
How much does truth matter in a post-truth society?
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.
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?
The truth still reigns supreme, it is just that people sometimes suffer unnecessarily because they do not know what the truth is.
We need to see when one side ignores the other side. We need a list of unanswered questions to hold every side accountable.
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?
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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.
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.
This seems to be the heart of the problem.
Although Twitter's problem is way harder, IMO.
-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
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.
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.
But if you're squinting that hard, not a lot of light is getting through.
When you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
I believe that the social networks have built technologies that probably can't actually be made to work in a socially beneficial way, since they're utterly dependent on crowdsourcing and automation for economic reasons, but those tools aren't actually up the the problems they face.
The answer to "who fact-checks the fact-checkers" is "the fact checkers".
And we can use consensus, reputation, and checks against known facts to validate the checks themselves. If group A, group B, and group C all agree and group D disagrees, then we can say with relative confidence that D is probably wrong in this case. It is safe to go with the consensus.
However, if A, B, C are notoriously unreliable and have a history of distorting claims, then it is beneficial to see why D disagrees with all three. Or even not use A, B, and C as sources.
We can also judge a fact-checker's veracity by how they evaluate a claim. Do they provide sources for their claim. It's one thing to say "This will murder 40 people a minute" and quite another to say "This claim disagrees with a recent study by the CDC [link to study] that says it will only murder 39 people a minute".
The only reason to cast doubt on the process or activity of fact-checking is if you don't want people checking your facts.
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.
Over a twitter spat? Seems like a waste of resources.
> 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.
Whatever the Twitter fact checking note says, you should still not take any information from the internet at facee value.
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
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?
Gender, in the context of language referring to a person, has a fairly settled meaning.