He announced his decision to work with two major news agencies Twitter. In particular, it will work with Reuters and the Associated Press to reduce the fake news and more generally misinformation on its platform by some users, especially in the midst of a pandemic
It is noted that this is the first time that Twitter officially collaborates with news organizations, in order to promote reliable information and news among its users. Earlier this year, Twitter launched the new Birdwatch system, which allows volunteer users to tag inaccurate tweets and fake news.
The goal is for the two historical and competing agencies to help Twitter get better information on events and news that generate a large number of messages and to remove without delay the misleading content posted by some users, such as anti-vaccine content.
Twitter is trying to quickly – with the help of agencies – provide accurate and reliable information, especially on “facts in question”. Instead of waiting for something fake to go “viral”, Twitter hopes to be able to prevent such a development.
It is worth noting that so far Twitter has a special team that undertakes, when “fights” break out between users on controversial issues, to find and promote content from trusted sources, so as to counterbalance the potential misinformation by some users.
The two news agencies, according to the BBC and Reuters, will help more systematically and directly in this process, initially only in English, “increasing its ability to add credible content to conversations on Twitter”, especially when Twitter’s internal team “does not have the specific expertise or access to a sufficient volume of credible news.”
The contribution of the two agencies will be made independently of the work of the internal Twitter teams that are constantly “checking” whether the messages of the users violate its regulations. It is estimated that Twitter – based in San Francisco – has at least 1,500 employees whose job it is to watch the posts on the platform, which are made by its nearly 200 million daily users.
Both Reuters and AP are also working with Facebook to check the reliability of its posts.
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