(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) Now that Twitter has purged conservatives from its platform, it hopes that a crowd-sourced fact-checking system will keep false information off the website, One America News Network reported.
Twitter’s far-left user base will ensure that the new project, called Birdwatch, will dispute and censor tweets from conservative accounts.
Birdwatch will let users report tweets and write responses to them. If the responses sway Twitter’s censors, then they will attach them to the original tweet.
President Joe Biden’s administration, left-wing activists and corporate media outlets have all called on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms to censor or fact-check more content.
Birdwatch will let Twitter fact-check more conservative information under a democratic guise—the left-wing user base, not the Tech Titans themselves, will choose who to target.
“We believe that a community-driven approach to address misleading information can help people be better informed,” Twitter wrote in a post about Birdwatch.
Twitter has kept the Birdwatch pilot program off the platform’s main feed, but soon randomly selected users will see the crowd-sourced fact-checking and be able to rate its accuracy and helpfulness.
Twitter believes that Birdwatch will sway users’ opinions about the information they read.
Users reported a 20 to 40 percent decrease in their willingness to believe a tweet’s information after reading a Birdwatch note, according to a survey.
The first example that came up on the Birdwatch feed was about Vice President Kamala Harris’s asinine discussion about the Russian-Ukrainian War.
“Ukraine is a country in Europe,” Harris said. “It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine, so basically that’s wrong.”
One user “fact-checked” a tweet about Harris’s statement.
Adrian Hilton, a Twitter blue-check, said, “This lacks context. Kamala Harris was visiting a kindergarten, and was asked by the teacher to explain a complex political issue to six-year-olds. She did well.”
Thus, Birdwatch’s top fact-check promoted misinformation.
Harris made the comment on the “Morning Hustle” radio program in response to co-host “Headkrack,” the New York Post reported.