Community Notes is the best feature. I wonder why wouldn't original Twitter implement it. Maybe it would deflate the bias they wanted to project on the rest of us.
2021 January - Birdwatch launched with first 1000 users
2022 October - Elon acquires Twitter
2022 November - Birdwatch renamed to Community Notes
2022 December - Community Notes feature made available to tweets around the world
Maybe Elon pushed the release schedule timeline up, but it would not be correct to state that pre-Elon Twitter didn't develop and launch the feature. It had been live for almost 2 years by the time Musk showed up.
I was a fairly early Birdwatch tester; they definitely permitted political posts to be annotated. I can't recall either way on ads; given Musk never made a big "I'm enabling it on ads!" announcement I suspect it was always possible.
(Especially considering you can promote a post after the fact; it's not necessarily an ad to start with.)
When reddit first added fake/branded posts as ads for a short while it was possible for people to post on the branded posts. It was hilarious (vicious roasting of the products and brand) but of course that was quickly locked down.
Community notes was started a long time before musk bought Twitter, it was rolled out progressively before coincidentally getting at full speed around (but still 3 weeks before) the acquisition.
> Maybe it would deflate the bias they wanted to project on the rest of us.
I think that an important thing to understand is that social media generally doesn't project a single bias. It is more dangerous: it creates bubbles that encompass groups of people and then mine their minds for attention. This results in polarization, increased rage, and fake outrage, and the like.
So it isn't really helpful to complain that Twitter is leftwing or rightwing etc.; it amplifies for you whatever you already believe. Even though we can generally accept that people's minds don't really change on big issues (whether online or in person), one big problem with social media is that it disincentives listening to each other. "Distincentivze" is perhaps euphimistic - it puts up hard to penetrate walls between us. We don't listen to each other, even if the other person has a worldview or conviction that we detest.
Community Notes corrects for atleast factual claims right away. I have seen it on ads of products where the product is free and the Community Notes said the product is free only for a week. Here's a thing about fake outrage, for an outrage to be effective the opinion expressed in the tweet multiples the fact vector by a million, but community notes effectively deflates the opinion if it tries to do that. A person getting community noted, in my mind at least, means is ill-informed and not to be trusted.
It's not opinion or votes all the way down. The corrections have to be referenced. So if someone is misrepresenting a fact, it will be community noted and votes will accumulate as all that remains to do is verify the referenced source.
It really is. An unreferenced note may be voted up; a well-referenced one may not. There's certainly no requirement you even click the references to see if they say what's claimed. A misrepresented fact may be noted, and it's certainly not synchronous.
Personally I agree. It’s a social engineering feature and, accordingly, you need a lot of time to see how the system ends up abusing/adapting/repurposing it.
It’s just an easy critique: “they don’t ship fast enough according to my totally uninformed and arbitrary assessment!”
I think even 2021 is late for such a critical feature. It should have been thought of and implemented even earlier. If Twitter can maintain an army of bluecheck mark verifiers, reversing bad community notes could be handed over to them or similar group of people, especially when Twitter's aim was to be goto source of quality information.
