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On Musk's Twitter "Gamechanger" Community Notes [1]

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Date: 2022-11-12  

“...still small, with only a few dozen volunteers writing the majority of the notes on tweets in the past month, since Twitter made it available to all U.S. users.”

In reality, Birdwatch/Community Notes contributors are a relatively small group of independent, unpaid volunteers that collectively selects, analyzes, and determines the veracity of the claims made in Tweets that come to their attention. ‘Birdwatchers’ do this by contributing Notes on claims made by Tweet authors and rating them. Once a Note receives enough positive ratings, it is automatically displayed under the Tweet it references.

Birdwatch/Community Notes was opened up in early October in the U.S. to accept more participants. This leads to a problem with Musk’s “gamechanger”. The current number of active, unpaid participants cannot keep up with the expectations for the program. The problem becomes more acute with the announced moves into longform text and video . The number of contributors needs to increase greatly, which is the likely reason

While this may resolve the capacity issue but leads to other problems regarding quality of participation — are the people writing and rating notes acting in good faith and without adding in their own ideological lean? By opening up the program to anyone who wants to participate, the project is now clogged with Tweets not needing review and junk Notes on relevant Tweets.

“Comedy is now legal [on Twitter]” Additionally, useful content can be brigaded and downrated, preventing it from being displayed. This can even happen with Notes initially achieving a helpful status, as was the case with a ‘fact-check’ of a recent Musk Tweet that went viral and disappeared shortly after. x This is getting good now. Twitter has added a “fact check” to Elon Musk’s own tweet falsely claiming activist groups are responsible for a massive drop in Twitter revenue. Twitter points out it’s his own mismanagement that’s responsible. pic.twitter.com/lTSPOFotVL — Mike Sington (@MikeSington) November 4, 2022 This problem is exacerbated by Twitter’s method of rating/ranking Birdwatcher contributions; its algorithm decides whether or not a contributed Note appears on a Tweet using several factors such as estimates of contributor bias, number of Notes written rated as being helpful, number of ratings on Notes later achieving a helpful status, etc:

Birdwatch’s secret sauce lies in a sophisticated ranking system. It doesn’t simply count up the helpful and not-helpful ratings but employs an algorithm that rewards notes for being rated highly by participants who normally disagree, such as conservatives and liberals.

Even before changes were made to the ranking system earlier this year, ‘Helpful’ contributions to more contentious issues — especially those politically-charged or related to public events such as the COVID pandemic — infreqently showed up under a Tweet. Twitter’s own analysis identifies this as an issue with using “bridge-based ranking” to elevate otherwise valid contextualization:

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/12/2135583/-On-Musk-s-Twitter-Gamechanger-Community-Notes

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