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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> this isn't new (it started a couple of years ago I believe)

4 CEOs have supported this project ... so far.

Huh! Never heard of it before.

Yes, we've taken "new" out of the title now.

I’m not an employee, and I’ve been a Birdwatch contributor since shortly after the feature was first introduced.

> 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 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.

Poster you’re replying to said it’s not replacing work done by paid, now laid off, employees.

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.

I didn't intend for my comment to be interpreted that way, I don't think most people are. But you are right, I could have phrased it better.

There has been a lot of rumour and speculation about the moderation teams being sacked. I don't know what's true, but it does sound like they may have had fewer redundancies than in other departments. But what we do know is this "birdwatch" initiative isn't related to it if it has happened.

The post has been made with an editorialised title implying that this is new. Nowhere on the linked page does it say it is new. In the context of this week, and the rumours, it would imply that they are connected. They are not.

The post smells a little like someone generating clickbait for karma.

Birdwatch is not new but this is new:

>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 is something Elon Musk tweeted out recently. He seems to think that agreement on topic B by people who previously disagreed on topic A means they must be right on topic B.

No, it means diversity of opinion.

Keep the "diversity of opinion" in the tweets but not in the fact checking.

How?

Would like to see some data on this, but it sounds like an effective rating system. I’d be concerned that getting statistical significance would be challenging without creating pseudo pairs of labelers likely to disagree on issues.

In Europe the political fringes, the far-left and far-right, disagree about almost everything. But they have also agreed on a lot of things like being anti-EU and pro-Russia. Elon Musk's system will consider their opinions about the EU and Russia to be more correct than that of other users.

> Elon Musk's system will consider their opinions about the EU and Russia to be more correct than that of other users

Speculation. Also, this system predates Musk's acquisition.

This is known as the horseshoe effect, where far-left and far-right are closer to each other than they are to the center.

It doesn't necessarily doom the system though, as long as people with extreme views don't outnumber more moderate people.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

But (as stated) they disagree on most things. Because they are both usually in the opposition to the governing parties, they do opposition work and present dissenting opinions on vaccine efficacy, war support etc.

Often these few common topics overlap with the libertarian viewpoint.

I don't understand that argument. If the government supports a war, doesn't that make any opposition parties more likely to agree with each other that the war is bad? Of course they can disagree with the war for different reason, but both parties being in opposition and dissenting still makes them more likely to have common ground.

Edit: unless we are talking about one or two party systems, there the dynamics are stranger

They agree on few things and disagree on most. Horse shoe effect is just a way how to dismiss actual real politics and ideologies so one can wave hands.

They disagree on a lot of things, but they also disagree on a lot of things with moderate people, so that observation alone doesn't refute "far-left and far-right are closer to each other than they are to the center".

Of course the horseshoe effect is not some objective truth that's true in every country, that would be silly. I think the interesting part of it is that extreme ends of any political spectrum experience a similar environment: they are often shunned, distrust the mainstream media, attract social outcasts, etc. Just the shared experience of being on the edge of the spectrum often leads to similarities between them.

That is not new.

The documentation is checked into GitHub[1]. It was checked in on March 2nd, 2022. This was a month before Musk bought his 9.2% share of Twitter.

[1] https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch/blob/main/content/diver...

Sweet fact check!

Easiest kind! I knew the fact already, and Twitter made it really easy for me to validate it.

So easy for a government twitter farm to game, and amplify the "authority" of the opinions they care about after disagreeing on starcraft or cooking.

Yet still more difficult than having a direct login for government to come in and censor things, the existence of which leaked a few weeks ago.

Two different use cases, both of which suck.

Link? I missed the news about this.

https://thepostmillennial.com/facebook-portal-for-dhs-conten...

I don't know what kind of site "thepostmillennial" is, but I'm fairly sure the story referred to is this:

https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...

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