Twitter's crowd-sourced Community Notes is rolling out to users globally.
Introduced in 2021 as Birdwatch under former CEO Jack Dorsey, the feature invites contributors to augment misleading or factually incorrect tweets with an explanation of why the content is unreliable. Initially available only to US users, notes are now visible around the world.
"If you don't see them yet, don't fret," the Community Notes team tweeted on Sunday. "It's in the process of rolling out." Citing "important nuances in each market," the social network will expand its contributor base country by country, adding new participants "soon."
Anyone can apply online to become a contributor; once approved, you may propose notes for rating by the wider Twitter user base. The platform uses a bridging algorithm, which accounts for the number of contributors rating a note as Helpful or Not Helpful, as well as whether those people provide different perspectives on the subject.
The top note—often with clickable links—is added to the offending tweet for additional context. An onboarding process, meanwhile, requires new contributors to consistently rate other's contributions and reliably identify those notes that are helpful or not.
On average, people are up to 40% less likely to agree with a post accompanied by an explanatory note than those who see the tweet on its own, according to Twitter, which also found that someone who sees a note is up to 35% less likely to like or share that post.
The fact-checking algorithm, as well as all of the data powering it, is publicly available on GitHub, allowing researchers, hobbyists, or anyone who's curious about how Twitter operates to run the program on their own computer.