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btilly

The "context" note is based on a program named birdwatch.

According to rumor, virtually the entire team responsible for birdwatch just got laid off.

I'm curious what the future of this kind of context will be.

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From Keith Coleman today, who authored the original post announcing birdwatch [1]

> The team is on a mission that has had the support of 3 CEOs. We're cranking.

> to all team members, contributors and advisors past and present — an amazing, mission-driven set of people.

https://twitter.com/kcoleman/status/1588611638655320064

Also, Elon has endorsed it: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587798343622737925

Hoping it stays, I love the bottom up nature of it.

[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...

That is the best news I've heard.

I'm way more in favor a of a system that employs the userbase to "fact check" than whatever busybody connected to a partisan "fact checker" at twitter doing it manually and adding their own particular bias.

The problem is that special knowledge is also prone to bias. Some correct, but unpopular expert opinion can be also voted to be wrong, when the level of required knowledge is substantially high.

I think the point at which "popular but wrong" starts winning out is way lower than you think are implying it is when you're talking about internet cesspools that have a cross section of the general public (Twitter, Reddit, 4Chan, etc).

If you're talking about a forum or somewhere that the casually interested internet riff raff won't dominate the bar moves higher.

That said, I'd rather have internet idiots do group fact checking than have established institutions be in charge of it.

Why do you think the userbase would be superior? Twitter, like most social media platforms, prioritizes controversy. Pot-stirrers are the ones who get amplified. Why should we trust an incredibly polarized userbase to somehow lack bias?

If you're trying to find faults with a claim, then using one of those extremes seems completely appropriate. They will be the only ones motivated to do so.

But they aren't going to tell the truth. Republicans don't respond to Biden's policies with sober recitations of well-sourced factual criticism, but the kind of paranoid partisan hyperbole you'd find on Fox News, because their goal isn't truth but keeping and maintaining power in an age where voters primarily react on emotion, not logic and reason, within bubbles of manufactured hyper-reality. Misinformation from one side doesn't just cancel out misinformation from the other.

Birdwatch is designed to add context with which both extremes agree. The quoted watches are reasoned, and cite sources. Actually more informative than 99% of Twitter.

The change seems to be that it has now rolled out on all accounts rather than just Red accounts, and now there is drama.

More details about Birdwatch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474196

> The change seems to be that it has now rolled out on all accounts rather than just Red accounts, and now there is drama.

What do you mean by this? There was one high profile incident with the white house, but I am struggling to believe that’s when the controversy started.

There were a bunch of 'incidents'.

https://www.piratewires.com/p/birdwatch?utm_source=post-emai...

> All we know for sure is last week there were notable embarrassing contextualizations of right-wing propaganda, and no notable embarrassing contextualizations of left-wing propaganda. Now, there are many examples.

I was citing the highest profile, very recent incident. The one that got greater attention. I’m sure there have been other times Democrats have made statements that have been fact checked and found false, which is a good thing to do.

Still not sure where you’re getting this idea that there is suddenly an outcry because people across the aisle are just now being fact checked. Do you have any data on how often it was only Republicans vs. Democrats and how that shifted? Do you have any data on whether or not there’s been an uptick in bad information posted by Democrats? I just think you’re missing a lot of critical context here and your inferences are not really earned.

Because it's not sourced from "authority". Because the authorities are just as polarized as the userbase, but have power they didn't earn, and are rarely held accountable. Or at least they used to be on twitter.

Twitter's staff leanings (at least previously) aren't a secret: https://files.catbox.moe/3mvjhv.jpg With the userbase being the "fact checkers" there's at least a chance of balance, if not unbiased research. With their pre-Musk staff there was approximately a 1.3% chance of balance if political donations are any measure.

We'll see once changes are made to the platform itself.

To be clear, I'm more anti-authoritarian than a fan of either big party. If twitter's employees were 97% Republican donating I'd be saying the exact same thing.

> We'll see once changes are made to the platform itself.

Assuming we see anything of substance beyond his chest pounding about it and some loud firings. He explicitly said yesterday that he has not changed twitter’s content moderation policies to help advertisers feel better. Which isn’t surprising at all. The dude is outrageous and full of hot air, but he isn’t stupid. He knows that Twitter can’t function if there isn’t some moderation in place, and he knows it was a long road to get where they are now.

He can nitpick all he wants, but I am willing to gamble that 99% of the current policies will be in place a year from now and nothing substantive will change, which he’ll try to mask with a few more high profile stunts or proclamations.

Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-elon-musk-timeline-musk-sa...

Somehow Wikipedia made it work. Seems like a similar effort could work here, of course with the additional challenge of being more-realtime. It may be a different goal than the other parts of Twitter content, but that doesn't make it impossible.

There is no huge business motivation and profit goals behind Wikipedia.

To make it work, we need non-profit social media network. But one can dream, that is not going to happen.

Wikipedia doesn't have a clearly politically motivated, unpredictable leader - who didn't even want to own it/run it in the first place - at the helm of a for-profit platform, who is using said platform to wage a culture war.

Their editor culture is also pretty disciplined. I don’t think we have any reason to believe Twitter users are up to the task.

It's less that I trust the rabble, and more that I see the rabble as the lesser evil to the horrifying status quo of having war criminals like the Washington Post fact check claims on the Russo-Ukraine war because they're an "Authority" and a "paper of record" and "non-partisan" and "just checking facts".

I am strongly in favor of giving birdwatch a chance and maybe making a few adjustments along the way because we need something better than hack journalists and something more than wikipedia articles.

By design, Birdwatch appears designed to reward people who consistently provide notes that are neutral, factual, and offer relevant citations. It is designed not to be a popularity context where popular notes bubble to the top.

I'm sure that there will be ways to game it. But it does not appear to be being gamed at the moment.

That is exactly what birdwatch is: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...

You can apply it arbitrarily to technically correct tweets that you do not like.

After reading about the Birdwatch technical details, I'm strangely optimistic. I wasn't expected that. It's pretty clever.

I mean the team being laid off doesn't mean birdwatch won't be used unless it literally just breaks down. Birdwatch is user sourced.

If Elon Musk gets rid of birdwatch I will scream bloody murder because that's probably the best approach I've seen to fact checking since the invention of wikipedia summaries on google search results.

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