“The notes from the community are the best thing that has happened to Twitter”, write a user “Twitter was getting mega disgusting lately but the community notes give me the reason to get back in,” says another. “Community Notes are the best thing Twitter has come up with in years, I love seeing a post and the person outright lying,” add another.
On X, formerly Twitter, it’s easy to find all kinds of opinions. But dozens of posts about the new “community notes” are celebratory. In Spain its appearance has increased in the last week of August. The “notes” are a community moderation system for the platform, written and valued by its users. The idea came from the old Twitter of Jack Dorsey, its co-founder. Created in 2021, then it was called Birdwatch. Since buying it, Elon Musk has renamed it after him and has become his biggest supporter. Your own account has received corrections: “Community Notes apply equally to all accounts on this platform without exception, including world leaders and our biggest advertisers.” As in Wikipedia, it consists of transferring to a group of registered users the responsibility of reducing disinformation on the network.
They arrived in Spain in tests in April and since July they have been opened to all users, the first European country where this has happened. In France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium they arrived a month later and, as of this week, they are open in 23 European countries. Except for Brazil, in several Latin American countries registration is open, but the system does not fully work. On this page you can read posts with their “notes” in all languages.
The rate of publication of notes is low and is focused on viral posts or from famous accounts. The official X account that collects the “most useful” notes it has only 235 messages. The affected profiles range from the candidate for the presidency of the Government, Alberto Núñez Feijóo (who ignored details of a sexual offender), a mexican journalist (who exaggerated about the danger of dumped water in Japan) or the Secretary of State for Equality about consent and the Penal Code. In recent days, the posts about Luis Rubiales and the World Cup won by the Spanish soccer players have dominated the news. Several traditional media also take their rebuke and also tweets with a lot of diffusion, about strange forms of nature (all false) or how an animal flees from a cheetah thanks to a fart (made up).
The system is perfect for becoming on a new political and cultural battlefield. There are users of the platform who beg for a note for publications they dislike: the pleasure of seeing the rival suffer for a note assigned by hundreds or thousands of votes is much greater than when the “false” label is placed by a medium or fact-checker. The system, to protect itself from interested disqualifications, is more complex than it seems. Registered users see a handful of suggested notes that other users have written. They must assess them, not only if it is true or not, but why or why not.
“The process consists of rating whether the note is useful and then a series of criteria appears for you to mark what has determined your decision,” says the user Daurmith, who prefers not to give her real name. “If you use quality fonts, if you provide important context, if the language is neutral. And if you classify it as not useful, you have a different battery of criteria: tendentious language, it does not give sources or they are not reliable”.
We have found that the Community Notes pilot in Spain is useful for people from different perspectives. Today, we are making Spain’s notes fully visible around the world. Thanks to the collaborators in Spain! 🇪🇸
—Community Notes (@CommunityNotes) July 6, 2023
The system also prevents editors from getting into arguments. “Within the grades, you cannot create a battlefield, because if someone puts a grade and I grade it, my grade does not appear for that person,” she says. streamer Andrea Sanchis, registered user. Editors are anonymous: your username on X is not the same as your nickname for the note-editing platform. To be a member of this court collective it is only necessary to have a telephone number and fill out a small form. You don’t have to pay the monthly X subscription either.
But it is inevitable that sometimes they get complicated. EL PAIS has seen the messages below a video linked to the Luis Rubiales controversy. It was a particularly contentious post: there were 7 note proposals (none approved at the time) and then another 6 explaining why he doesn’t need a note. One that defends that context should not be added says, for example: “The video is clear, and provides the necessary context. No note required. The viewer who decides to think as he wishes and sees fit, but the information or video is not manipulated. The acronym “No Need Note” (NNN) will soon be a central message in the battle for the new system. X’s algorithm decides with votes from other users if it should show any “note” to all users.
X only publishes those that have received enough votes in favor from users who usually disagree with their ratings. This should indicate, in principle, ideological transversality. Thus X defends itself against partisan or trolled operations. Once open, the note can continue to be rated, even by non-registered users who see it; it is not uncommon for a note already published to end up disappearing later.
Although registered users should not value everything that the platform suggests, there are many more notes in circulation than the handful that ends up being published: “By eye, I could estimate that only between 5% and 10% of those that are published are made public. they are written”, calculates the professor of the University of A Coruña Manuel Herrador, another registered user.
Is it used to control misinformation?
How useful is such a system to control disinformation? There is something good about it and perhaps that is why it provokes enthusiasm for now: it adds collective intelligence. “It is true that collective moderation and contextual information is a very good tool to capture quality information and at the same time better identify disinformation,” says Sílvia Majó, professor at the Vrije University of Amsterdam and researcher at the Reuters Institute (Cambridge). . “Developer help websites like Stack Overflow work like this. This way of aggregating collective intelligence and placing it in a contextual way is a good ally for bringing out the highest quality content,” she says.
Wikipedia is the great success story of this type of collective intelligence that the Internet has brought. Can information platforms in real time adapt this format? Is not easy. Notes usually appear hours or days after the original post. If a user has interacted with it, X says to show it again. “I think it’s a good solution for a platform like X”, says Àlex Hinojo, editor at Wikipedia. “But you need a good volunteer base. It will depend on how they segment the participation by languages or topics and on whether the entry curve is easy, ”he adds. But can it become a polarized and useless battlefield? “Yes of course. It is the difficult balance”, says Hinojo.
“The process in general is quite demotivating,” says Herrador. “One ends up grading a lot of notes to later see that very few are made public, or writing many that have no results. I don’t see a future for it in the medium or long term, because as an altruistic task it is very demotivating, so I see it as probable that it will end up being dominated by interest groups”, he adds. It is one of the challenges. As in the notes themselves, the debate is open. For another editor consulted by this newspaper, the computer scientist Míchel González, altruism and effort are a positive value: “The same thing was said about Wikipedia and there it is. The democratization of these systems is what prevents pressure groups from controlling the information”.
Editing conflicts on Wikipedia occur far from the eyes of its users. In X, votes and notes appear and disappear. The last post of the official account of the notes is precisely about this problem: “We updated the scoring algorithm to reduce notes that appear and then disappear as they receive a larger and potentially more representative set of marks,” the message says.
fired moderators
Twitter, before it was X, had a huge moderation team that tagged, punished, or deleted tweets. Now they are fired. Musk believes that the solution is to pass this responsibility on to its users. It will not be easy, according to Professor Majó: “The human layer of professional moderation must always exist. It is evident that disinformation strategies are also evolving in parallel to automated moderation strategies and it is difficult to foresee what will come next”.
Majó highlights the example of the Meta Advisory Council, which focuses on extremely sensitive issues. It is difficult for Musk to agree to submit to outside advice. His times are also maddeningly slow to resolve a current issue. Although the European Union has already warned him that it is better to think twice now with the new directive: “The obligations persist. You can run but you can’t hide.” said Commissioner Thierry Breton.
Musk’s push for the notes coincides with a growing insouciance from other networks about how much effort they put into moderating their platforms. “There is an important current within the platforms to gradually withdraw political content,” explains Majó.
A scientific article from Purdue University (USA) analyzed in 2022 the system that was then called Birdwatch. His results detected less misinformation but also less activity. This activity could be due to the fear of retweeting or amplifying a message that would later end up being “punished” by a correction from other users: “The findings suggest that, although the program helps to increase knowledge in writing, reduce extreme feelings and potentially Reducing misinformation in content incurs an economic cost in the form of reduced activity on the platform,” the authors write.
You can follow THE COUNTRY Technology in Facebook and Twitter or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
#polarized #battlefield #notes #community #Elon #Musks #bet #misinformation