Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Is TWITTER Saving The Internet?!?!”.
Let’S say you’re on the website, formerly known as Twitter. Statistically, most of you aren’t, but let’s pretend you’re Doom scrolling as usual, when suddenly you spot a post claiming that ancient aliens are living in bunkers beneath the Pyramids of Giza and they haven’t paid rent in nearly 12,000 years. But then right, underneath it you spot a little window. That says there actually aren’t any bunkers underneath the pyramids, alongside a link to a Wikipedia article on squatter’s rights. This little note stuck onto the bottom of a post like a little um.
Actually Barnacle is what EXC likes to call a community note, and it might just be the future of social media moderation. Social media platforms are under serious pressure to control the spread of misinformation by governments by investors by their own users. This puts companies in the awkward position of having to be the Arbiters of what is and isn’t factual reality and what is and isn’t acceptable speech. Some of those cases are going to be pretty clearcut.
The Earth isn’t flat and you can’t threaten to kill people, but there’s also going to be a lot of ambigu. That’S where Community notes comes in. It’S a genius feature that lets X, delegate responsibility for factchecking onto its user base, but also allows the users to build their own consensus as a community in a mostly polite, Democratic manner, without top- down sensorship Community notes were first added as a uson feature in January 2021, under the original name of bird watch, everything was better before it was rebranded and expanded in November 2022, shortly after the site fell under new management. The primary goal of the future is to combat misinformation, both intentional and unintentional, by crowdsourcing factchecking through Anonymous volunteers. When normal people encounter a post that lacks context, they get to be mad or misled, and move on, but users approved as Community notes. Contributors have a third option, a button that lets them add an asterisk to any misleading post.
The user will then be asked to specify why they think the post needs a note whether it’s misleading inaccurate, outdated satirical in a way that might go over many people’s heads Etc. The contributor will be encouraged to add a link to a reliable source backing their counter claim. Then that proposed note appears on the community notes, dashboard of other contributors who vote on whether or not it’s helpful contributors may even decide to write a counter counter claim on that proposed Community. Note explaining why it’s inaccurate or irrelevant and encouraging other contributors to vote against it to be clear, and this is actually where it gets interesting. This is not a simple majority system where, whichever note gets, the most votes wins, a note needs to hit a certain threshold of supporting votes and those votes need to show a general consensus among contributors who typically disagree with each other. This encourages contributors to stick to the facts and cite reliable sources.
When writing a note, it also makes it a lot harder for a partisan group to dog pile on a post and fact check it with their own personal opinion. This kind of system is Prim primarily attractive to two kinds of people: people with strong opinions and nitpickers who like to be right, but it’s balanced in such a way to disadvantage the opinionated and place nitpickers in the position of King maker. Unfortunately, many Rank and file normal people, users don’t understand how Community notes Works, which can lead to anger and mistrust of the future. People often perceive Community notes as coming from Twitter or attribute them personally to Elon Musk, despite the fact that musk himself is a frequent recipient of its fact, checks, others view the voting system as rigged because they don’t trust Twitter as an institution.
Worse as more and more people see and vote on a note, it might appear and disappear as it falls above and below the threshold to be seen by all users leading to the perception that a correction has been suspiciously removed by the powers that be likewise. It can be sometimes hard to fact check controversial figures with a passionate parasocial fan base who are willing to vote down perfectly reasonable criticisms, plus the contrib twit panel, isn’t all that visually distinct from the rest of Twitter, so some participants will take and post screenshots of Sick dunks they’ve submitted as Community notes, leading to the perception that this kind of petty squabbling is what’s actually getting put on people’s posts. It’S not, but perhaps the biggest concern with Community notes is that they demonetize any post that they’re applied to with the idea being to disincentivize for-profit disinformation like celebrity death, hoaxes or conspiracy Mills. The problem is that demonetization doesn’t take into account why the note was written in the first place, whether it was a correction, an update or even just additional context, but these are mostly minor issues specific to X’s implementation of community notes.
The deeper question is whether this is a principally good concept that we should try to implement elsewhere. Pretty much all social media companies use a mixture of algorithmic, filtering and user reports to fly potential problem posts which are then either automatically hidden or sent to a human moderator for a manual review. That last step, however, is often optional, even with thousands and thousands of moderators working around the clock, there’s just too much content to sift through this can result in both over and under moderation as rules get applied unevenly and often without human oversight. Notable examples include tumblr’s notorious Crackdown on adult material, which included a ban on female presenting nipples and a moderation algorithm so aggressive.
It would flag any picture with a large amount of beige or flesh tones as new, which is bad news for fans of Dune. So what could happen if we add Community note style, consensus mechanisms to this conventional system, we’ll explore that, right after this segue to our sponsor seic check out cic’s Prime tx1000 watt power supply, it’s a great choice if you’re building a high performance system – and it features An 80 plus titanium rating, which means less power, gets wasted, plus it’s fully modular and features hybrid fan, control and fluid Dynamic bearings to reduce fan, noise and best of all is their industry-leading. 12Year warranty did, I say: 12, yes, learn more at cic.gc.ca to Miriam Webster’s opinion on the origin of the word Riz, but you don’t necessarily want their opinion on Taylor.
Swift’S love life stay in your lane, Miriam by contrast, Community notes, contributors are wholly Anonymous and might lack any relevant expertise in the subject. They’Re assessing the only Authority Community notes has is built onto the public perception that it is a well- constructed system that creates good results. It does have its own advantages, however, in that it’s a lot faster and has a much higher capacity than traditional fact, Checkers, who typically have to f focus on the most important potential inaccuracies. That’S why you get a lot of traditional factchecking for National politicians, but relatively little factchecking for local politicians, who probably lie just as often there’s also a known problem where, after the fact, Corrections rarely have the same verality in reach as the initial incorrect claim, because they’re Just not nearly as exciting or interesting George Clooney got married to his own clone oops. Sorry, no! He didn’t Community notes, however, can at least stem the tide of a frequently repeated misconception, because, because they’re directly attached to the post, making the original claim and can be easily spread to copycat posts through the efforts of a few diligent community members.
These Corrections are then immediately available to Anyone who reads these posts rather than buried deep in the comments Community notes, contributors can even magnify information from traditional factchecking sources. Simply by linking to it. We can think of these two systems as being analogous to traditional academic sources and crowdsource information like Wikipedia one of them is good enough to go in an essay, while the other is at least good enough for social media. Community notes is also a better supplement than a replacement for standard moderation practices because it creates a middle ground that allows a platform to operate with a gentler hand, rather than always reaching for the banhammer or more likely on elon’s X.
Doing nothing. It’S potentially a problem for public discourse when important figures say offensive, inaccurate or controversial things, and those comments are removed rather than preserved and corrected. It’S also a known fact that many idea started out controversial, so we should at least try to be careful about which ideas we say aren’t even worth hearing Community note style fact: cheing allows contrarians to at least speak their minds. There are also clear benefits to a system of user participation that balances the power of individual contributors rather than allowing them to consolidate power and act as Petty leege Lords over their own little subdomains.
The way that Forum style platforms like Reddit do those some of those mods man. So now what do you think? How would you improve a feature like this? What platforms would you add, collaborative factchecking features to should participation be financially incentivized or rewarded? This is free labor. After all, thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos like this one on whether streaming is basically becoming cable and don’t forget to subscribe and follow and mail me a letter. Don’T do that! .