Twitter is enlisting its users to help combat misinformation on its service by flagging and notating misleading and false tweets.
The pilot program unveiled Monday, called Birdwatch, allows a preselected group of users — for now, only in the U. S. — who sign up through Twitter.
Twitter said it wants both experts and non-experts to write Birdwatch notes.
To help weed out unhelpful or troll-created notes, for instance, Twitter plans to attach a “helpfulness score” to each one and will label helpful ones “currently rated helpful.”
The program will start with 1,000 users and eventually expand beyond the U. S. San Francisco-based Twitter said it is trying to ensure that Birdwatch has a diverse range of perspectives and participants — an ongoing problem at Wikipedia, where many of the contributors and editors are white men.