Almost immediately after Musk took control of the company in late October 2022, he renamed Birdwatch "Community Notes," claiming that the system had "Incredible potential for improving information accuracy." In the months that followed, X systematically eradicated almost all of the teams and individuals overseeing content moderation and trust and safety at the company, putting even greater emphasis on the role of Community Notes. Joe Benarroch, head of business operations at X, tells WIRED that the company has contributors across 44 countries, and while he would not give an exact number, he noted that more than 10,000 people had joined the program in the past week. Alongside contributors who volunteer for the program, some contributors are invited by X itself, WIRED has learned, according to one contributor we spoke to and a search of X, where contributors say X invited them to join. Benarroch did not address whether there is any form of moderation for Community Notes. While Benarroch says "Community Notes were designed to tackle misinformation on X," Roth says their original intention was not to perform that task alone. "The intention of Birdwatch was always to be a complement to, rather than a replacement for, Twitter's other misinformation methods," says Roth. "The company fired the entire curation team, without whom misinformation enforcement can't operate, even if the policies are still on the books," he says, referring to the former employees who would create the collections of tweets for corrections or produce the labels to let users know if something was misinformative. "Community Notes is an imperfect replacement for Trust and Safety staff," says one former Twitter Trust and Safety employee who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. "You can't just outsource that work to the community." While X claims Community Notes is having a significant impact on tackling disinformation on the platform, the notes system itself can also spread disinformation. Last week WIRED revealed that a note appended to a post from Donald Trump Jr. wrongly claimed a video he posted about the Hamas attack on Israel was fake. The original note has since been replaced with one citing WIRED's report. Many notes written by contributors are never seen by the public. A WIRED examination of these unpublished notes shows that just like the main X platform, the Community Notes community is similarly riven by in-fighting and misinformation.
This Cyber News was published on www.wired.com. Publication date: Thu, 30 Nov 2023 23:19:27 +0000