Twitter begins rolling out its Community Notes feature globally

Community Notes are now accessible worldwide, according to a tweet from Twitter over the weekend. The social media giant uses a mechanism called Community Notes, formerly known as Birdwatch, to crowdsource fact-checking.

Users can use the tool to contextualize tweets, and it uses an open-source methodology to disprove false information. Users can vote on whether they find the context included by program participants’ moderators to be helpful by adding notes to tweets. Community Notes were previously only accessible to users in the United States. Twitter intends to soon add moderators from other areas.

Beginning today, Community Notes are visible around the world 🌎🌍🌏

— Community Notes (@CommunityNotes) December 11, 2022

In a post announcing the global launch, Twitter stated that “anyone everywhere can now see and rate notes, helping to ensure notes are beneficial to folks from a wide range of views.”

Community Notes recently received an update, which the firm believes would make it easier to spot more “poor quality” fact checks. More contributors who post these unhelpful annotations will consequently lose their writing capacity, according to Twitter, necessitating that such people re-earn their “contributor” designation. The algorithmic modification involves assigning points for scoring remarks that explain why a tweet isn’t deceptive.

Shortly after Elon Musk acquired control of Twitter, Birdwatch underwent a name change to “Community Notes.” According to the new CEO, this adjustment “is a gamechanger for boosting accuracy on Twitter.” Community Notes was initially intended to be a mechanism that would offer a layer of context and fact-checking to tweets that don’t necessarily break Twitter’s rules. But in the Musk age, Community Notes might have an even bigger impact because Twitter now has a far smaller moderator staff as a result of its layoffs.

Community Notes’ increased visibility comes as Twitter formally reinstated its Twitter Blue membership service. According to a tweet from the corporate account, web sign-ups will cost $8 per month and iOS sign-ups would cost $11 per month for “access to subscriber-only features, including the blue checkmark.”