FactChecking

Amid the debate over the government forming a fact-checking unit to curb the flow of misinformation on various social media platforms, Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, on Saturday said there are no sweeping powers or a draconian move at the behest of the Centre which solely aims to safeguard its "digital nagriks".Replying to a tweet from Independent MP Kapil Sibal, Chandrasekhar said that the new IT rules "already provide for social media platforms to ensure nine types of content to be…

As Elon Musk works quickly to reshape Twitter Inc. and realize his vision for a platform more focused on free speech, one feature is gaining prominence: Community Notes.Previously called Birdwatch, the feature is designed to combat false and misleading information by relying on crowdsourced contributions to add context to tweets. Mr. Musk has publicly supported the feature, which has fact-checked his own tweeting. It predates his takeover of Twitter late last month.  The new owner of the…

Unlike Polis, Twitter’s project has to find consensus not for one question at a time but for any conceivable controversy on the platform. Community Notes does that by estimating the diversity of viewpoints among participants, based on how different users rate the helpfulness of notes from others. Twitter’s version of bridging the divide is to find notes considered useful by raters who don’t usually agree on much, suggesting they have different viewpoints. This technique at the heart of Polis and Community Notes is called …

Twitter has announced that Birdwatch, its crowdsourced fact-checking feature, is now available across the United States.Birdwatch is a way for people to get a feel for the accuracy and reliability of content shared in a tweet and puts notes on tweets to help people make up their own mind. Now, all Twitter users in the United States can see those notes for the first time.Twitter announced the move via a series of tweets, saying that it's been "building and studying Birdwatch in public for over a year." Over those tweets,…

Twitter Inc will expand its community fact-checking project called Birdwatch, the social media company said, deepening its novel approach to a new form of content moderation. Birdwatch launched last year, allowing some Twitter users to debunk misleading tweets by attaching notes to the content in order to provide context or point to accurate sources. Social media platforms including Twitter have long faced competing pressures on how to moderate content that appears on their services. Critics have accused the companies of…

Twitter announced on Wednesday that it is bringing several new additions to its Birdwatch community fact-checking programme that was launched last year. The Birdwatch programme consists of users who help identify potentially misleading tweets and add notes to provide context with added information. The social media platform has now revealed that it is rolling out a new onboarding process for the programme. Furthermore, Twitter will be increasing the visibility of notes to increase the seemingly positive impact Birdwatch…

Image Source : AP Facebook's Meta logo Meta news: Meta on Tuesday revealed it is extending its third-party fact-checking programme in India to include NewsMeter, which is a fact checker focused on the southern states of the country. The programme will now allow for more accuracy and bolster its fact checking capabilities in regional Indian languages including Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, and Tamil, the company said in a statement. Including this partnership, Meta will have 11 fact-checking partners in India, making…

Meta, formerly known as Facebook, announced that it is adding four new languages to its fact-checking programme in India.The programme will now include Kashmiri, Bhojpuri, Odia, and Nepali, in addition to the existing 11 Indian languages, the company said in a statement.In addition, it has also partnered with NewsMeter, a fact checker primarily focused on the southern states of the country.The partnership will help connect people to accurate and verified information and enhance Meta's fact-checking capabilities in…

In 2020, the Wikipedia community was when it came out that a US teen had written 27,000 entries in a language they didn’t speak. The episode was a reminder that the online encyclopedia is not a perfect source of information. Sometimes people will attempt to edit Wikipedia entries out of malice, but frequently factual errors come from some well-intentioned individual making a mistake. That's a problem the Wikimedia Foundation recently partnered with Facebook parent company Meta to address. The two set their sights on…

WhatsApp is often used for circulating fake news and misinformation. Although the instant messaging app is claiming to have implemented a list of features to restrict fake news circulation, WhatsApp users get misleading messages containing unverified information on a regular basis. It, thus, becomes important to know how you can verify the information you get on WhatsApp. It is also relevant especially in today's time when state legislative assembly elections are going on and Ukraine is facing a deadly crisis due to…