Twitter has announced a partnership with the Associated Press and Reuters to assist its curation team in bringing more accurate and reliable content to users’ feeds. The Curation team are the people who work on the stuff you see in the Explore tab such as Trending, News, Sports, Entertainment, Fun, the topics that you personally follow, and more. They also manage Twitter Moments, where you can see the history of the topic through past tweets about it to provide context.
The platform says that through this partnership, users will see even more context at a faster pace on topics they’re reading about so that they have a more accurate picture on the matter. Trends will include contextual descriptions and links to reporting from reputable publications more frequently. They also say that the team will anticipate hot-button issues before it even goes viral and will contextualise the discourse to proactively counter potential misinformation.
This initiative will also benefit the platform’s community-driven Birdwatch feature by having participants use feedback from AP and Reuters to assess the quality of information. While the news outlets will only focus on English content, the Curation team itself serves 16 markets in five languages – including Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese.
“We’re excited to partner with Twitter to leverage our deep global and local expertise to serve the public conversation with reliable information,” said Hazel Baker, Reuters’ head of UGC newsgathering. A Twitter spokesperson said that this is the first time Twitter will formally collaborate with news organisations to elevate accurate information on its site.
The social media giant mentions that AP and Reuters, who are also fact-checkers for Facebook, will not be involved in enforcement decisions. That domain will remain under the umbrella of Twitter’s Trust & Safety teams who are in charge of determining whether tweets are in violation of the Twitter Rules.
(Sources: Twitter [1][2], Reuters, TechCrunch)
