The “ Birdwatch ” feature first came to light in August when engineer Jane Manchun Wong spotted it on Twitter ’s website . It wasn’t yet known by that name, but it was clear that the feature would allow moderators to flag a tweet and add notes to it.
Twitter updated its website shortly after Wong's discovery, and similar code was later found in its iOS. The company confirmed the feature and said it was an effort to combat fake news on platform . It's not yet clear how Birdwatch will work exactly.
The social media giant has been working on mitigating misinformation on its platform recently, and it even flagged the US President's tweet in one of its checks.
Of course, there is a general idea of how this feature. It will bring an “Add to Birdwatch” button to the menu, from which the user will be able to access the “report” and “block” functions.
It will also add an icon near the bottom right corner of each tweet. This will allow for adding notes and the ability to see notes added by other moderators. Twitter Birdwatch is likely to add more content to misleading posts through crowdsourcing.
Crowdsourcing is nothing new to Twitter. The platform uses it to moderate Periscope, its app . However, the seamless operation of crowdsourcing is a bit of a concern when it comes to the Twitter app. If every user gets Birdwatch, parts of Twitter could see thousands of comments or notes on a single tweet. So far, however, there are no further details on how exactly the feature will work.
