Twitter is now accepting contributions to Community Notes from four more countries – TechCrunch

Twitter’s fact-checking program, Community Notes, is now open to contributors in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. Twitter said over the weekend that it was growing the contributor base by 10% per week by onboarding new people to the program. The social media company also promised to include people from other countries.

Community notes are intended to allow users to add more context to tweets via links and reports. The program has been widely used to debunk or correct claims made in popular tweets.

Twitter introduced the social fact-checking program in the United States under “Birdwatch” last year. In September, Twitter began adding more contributors just before the US midterm elections. A month later, it made notes added by contributors visible to all users in the United States.

After Elon Musk started running Twitter, he renamed ‘Birdwatch’ to ‘Community Notes’ – despite former Twitter chief Jack Dorsey thinking it’s the “most boring Facebook name ever”. Musk believed the project “is a game-changer for improving accuracy on Twitter.”

In December, the social network said it was making community ratings visible to people around the world. However, the contributions come from users based in the United States. With the latest announcement, the company is changing that. If someone wants to join the program, Twitter requires that they have a verified phone number and a six-month account.

However, one requirement that seems to put people off is a “trusted network provider”. Many have complained that their network is not eligible and that Twitter does not have a list of trusted carriers. It is likely that the company is filtering operators who have facilitated spam accounts through SMS authentication. But in this case, he must be transparent about the process and work with network providers to prevent spam.

Last week, it also began posting these notes under quoted tweets on the iOS app and across the web.

Over the past few months, Twitter has also made several changes to the Community Ratings algorithm, including changing the visibility of low-quality ratings, expanding the type of notes for contributorsand stabilizer contribution impact score.

After Musk’s takeover, Twitter cut thousands of full-time and contract jobs, including people working on trust and safety and content moderation. This has impacted the social network’s ability to filter out harmful content and, in turn, retain high-spending advertisers on the platform. So it’s no surprise to see the company push the program that enforces fact-checking on users.