Technology
Twitter collaborates with news sites to address disinformation
Twitter has announced to collaborate with two of the largest international news organizations, Reuters and Associated Press (AP), to expose disinformation on its messaging site.
It has been reported that Twitter will use the assistance of these news agencies in generating more context and background information on events that produce an extensive volume of tweets.
Twitter’s target is to prevent the circulation of false content, as there is a renewed pressure to remove misleading information from the social networking service.
According to Twitter, this collaboration will allow it to ensure that accurate and credible information is promptly accessible ‘when facts are in dispute.
"Rather than waiting until something goes viral, Twitter will contextualize developing discourse at pace with or in anticipation of the public conversation," Twitter said.
For now, the American microblogging service will be working separately with the two rival news providers, and would first concentrate on English-language content.
Reuters and AP, both also work with Facebook to check facts.
These teams will be held responsible for labelling tweets that include manipulated media, electoral misinformation and sensitive media that violates the platforms' rules.
At the moment, Twitter’s Curation team finds and promotes authentic context from credible sources to counter potentially misleading information posted by users.
Twitter released a post, that read, the new program would "increase the scale and speed" of this work by increasing their "capacity to add reliable context to conversations happening on Twitter".
Twitter further added that the material from Reuters and AP would raise the quality of information credibility on the platform as Twitter’s team "doesn't have the specific expertise or access to a high enough volume of reputable reporting on Twitter".
Previously, Twitter initiated Birdwatch, a new community which enabled volunteers to label tweets they found to be inaccurate.
Twitter has about 1,500 moderators - with 199 million daily Twitter users worldwide, cited by a 2020 report.