Twitter Expands Its Community Notes' Crowdsourced Fact-Checker To Thwart Misleading Images

Twitter Community Notes on Media

Thanks to generative AI and deepfake technology, AI-generated images start becoming common in the digital world.

And Twitter, as a place where pretty much everyone gather to see what's new, and share what's what, the platform has deployed a feature to help users in identifying AI-generated images on its platform. Twitter calls it the 'Notes on Media' feature.

The feature is meant to tackle new-age fake content.

The feature adds the crowdsourced fact-check feature 'Community Notes' so users can add notes beside photos and videos shared on the platform, especially the ones that may have images that have been generated by or altered using AI.

"Community Notes are frequently added to Tweets that feature images or videos. In many cases, these notes can provide valuable context, not just for a single Tweet, but for any Tweet containing the same media," reads the official Twitter note.

"Community Notes aims to create a better informed world by empowering people on Twitter to collaboratively add context to potentially misleading Tweets," Twitter wrote in an official help page.

Twitter's Community Notes feature is meant to "create a better-informed world, by empowering people on Twitter to collaboratively add helpful notes to Tweets that might be misleading."

It does this by gathering contributors to write and rate notes.

"The more people that participate, the better the program becomes,'

Because it allows the public from "diverse perspectives" to judge the legitimacy of a content, and that Community Notes doesn't work by majority rules, and that Twitter doesn't choose what shows up, rate or moderate notes, the feature is meant to be open-sourced and transparent.

And the Community Notes on Media is a way to make people the judges themselves.

"Today we’re piloting a feature that puts a superpower into contributors’ hands: Notes on Media," Twitter said.

"If you’re a contributor with a Writing Impact of 10 or above, you’ll see a new option on some Tweets to mark your notes as 'About the image'. This option can be selected when you believe the media is potentially misleading in itself, regardless of which Tweet it is featured in."

The idea is that, notes attached to an image will automatically appear on recent and future matching images.

Twitter’s raters, the users who rate the Community Notes on Images, and readers, generic users, people like you and me, will see the notes that authors or the contributors mark as “about the image” slightly differently, which will help them understand that they should be interpret these notes as they are about the media file attached in the tweet and not the specific Tweet that the media file is attached to.

To put it simply the ‘about the image’ will be marked slightly differently in a Tweets for the users to understand that the note pertains to the media file in a Tweet and not the Tweet itself.

Furthermore, Twitter said that the ratings in the ‘about the image’ section will help in identifying cases where a note may not apply to a specific Tweet.

But this feature has some limitations at the moment.

Twitter says that the Community Notes’ ‘About the Image’ feature has some limitations at the moment. As of now, this feature supports Tweets with a single image. However, the company does plan to expand it further. In a blog post, the company said that it is planning to expand it to videos, Tweets with multiple images and videos and even GIFs.

“Currently, this feature is experimental and only supports Tweets with a single image. We’re actively working on expanding it to support Tweets with multiple images, GIFs, and videos,” Twitter wrote.

The feature is unleashed about a week after an AI-generated image of a fake explosion outside the Pentagon went viral on Twitter.

Published: 
31/05/2023