Twitter will send a notification when a tweet you’ve replied to or retweeted receives a community rating

The blinding amplification of views or posts on social media is one of the main reasons for the rapid spread of misinformation. Over the years, prominent figures have posted or retweeted false information on Twitter. The social network now provides the ability to take down a retweet for such cases through a new Community Notes feature – its crowdsourced fact-checking program.

Twitter will now notify users if a tweet they liked, retweeted, or replied to receives contextual information from Community Notes contributors. “It helps give people extra context they might otherwise miss,” the company said in a tweet.

Liking, retweeting, or replying to a tweet gives it some sort of relevance in recommendation algorithms — and Twitter has been pushing its algorithmic feed for quite some time now. If the context of a Community Notes contributor can demystify the original view, chances are people will delete their likes or retweets.

The program was first introduced as “Birdwatch” in 2021 for US-based users. After Elon Musk bought Twitter, he renamed the program ‘Community Notes’ – even as Jack Dorsey thought it was the “most boring Facebook name ever”.

In December, Twitter began showing Community Ratings to all users around the world. In January, the company began accepting notes from contributors based in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand outside of the US. The global context is therefore always absent from the Community Notes program.

Over the past few months, Musk & co. made changes to the algorithm, such as tweaking the visibility of poor quality notes, extending the type of notes for contributorsand stabilizer contribution impact score.

As new management laid off several people, including contractors working in the security and trust department, Twitter’s reliance on algorithms and crowdsourcing for content moderation grew rapidly. That burden could increase further as the company shut down free API access to researchers, many of whom have helped report hate speech and misinformation on the platform.