Twitter is expanding Community Notes feature: What is it and how it will help fight ‘manipulated media’

Twitter is currently only testing the feature for tweets with a single image, but the company plans to expand the feature to support tweets with multiple images, GIFs and videos in the future.

Announcing the new feature via a post, the company said, “Contributors with a Writing Impact score of 10 or above have the option to write notes about the media found within Tweets, as opposed to focusing on the specific Tweet. Contributors should select this option when they believe the context added would be helpful independently of the Tweet the note is attached to.”

“Raters and readers will see notes that authors marked as “about the image” slightly differently, so it’s clear to everyone that they should be interpreted as about the media, not the specific Tweet. Ratings can help identify cases where a note may not apply to a specific Tweet.” Twitter Community Notes added 

Users will be able to add context either about the tweet or about embedded images. Once users click on ‘about the image’ toggle, the community note will appear on all tweets containing the same image.

The Notes on Media feature is currently in testing, which means it will not be able to match all tweets containing the same image, but the company says it is working to expand the reach of the feature while avoiding erroneous matches.

Twitter had announced its crowd-sourced fact-checking programme, Birdwatch, in the US in 2021. After Elon Musk acquired Twitter in a $44 billion deal, he renamed the feature Community Notes.

Twitter made the Community Notes feature available to tweets around the world in December last year.

Updated: 31 May 2023, 11:54 AM IST

Twitter is currently only testing the feature for tweets with a single image, but the company plans to expand the feature to support tweets with multiple images, GIFs and videos in the future.

Announcing the new feature via a post, the company said, “Contributors with a Writing Impact score of 10 or above have the option to write notes about the media found within Tweets, as opposed to focusing on the specific Tweet. Contributors should select this option when they believe the context added would be helpful independently of the Tweet the note is attached to.”

“Raters and readers will see notes that authors marked as “about the image” slightly differently, so it’s clear to everyone that they should be interpreted as about the media, not the specific Tweet. Ratings can help identify cases where a note may not apply to a specific Tweet.” Twitter Community Notes added 

Users will be able to add context either about the tweet or about embedded images. Once users click on ‘about the image’ toggle, the community note will appear on all tweets containing the same image.

The Notes on Media feature is currently in testing, which means it will not be able to match all tweets containing the same image, but the company says it is working to expand the reach of the feature while avoiding erroneous matches.

Twitter had announced its crowd-sourced fact-checking programme, Birdwatch, in the US in 2021. After Elon Musk acquired Twitter in a $44 billion deal, he renamed the feature Community Notes.

Twitter made the Community Notes feature available to tweets around the world in December last year.

Updated: 31 May 2023, 11:54 AM IST