Comment by lobocinza
1 year ago
Community notes are great and an important tool to fact check disinformation from politicians and VIPs to which traditional fact checkers often turn a blind eye. I say this from Brazil so your YMMV. While I'm not familiar with the Mr. Beast debacle on Twitter he and his content are extremely popular so it's natural for his content to be recommended. What wasn't "natural" was Twitter recommendations prior. Though there are many other reasons for not using Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
I can’t stress this enough, for anyone who (like myself) for some reason didn’t think this was possible: Twitter’s community notes are no different from tweets in their ability to spread misinformation.
What makes them worse than tweets (at least the original immutable tweets) at combatting intentional disinformation is that Birdwatch notes 1) are visually formatted to communicate an impression of absolute ground truth, and 2) don’t reflect any controversy or edit history.
A trending tweet with a false “correction” (such as the one that claimed a video of Xinjang police brutality against an Uyghur was showing Taiwanese police) would be viewed by millions of people, 99% of whom would read that note completely uncritically, before it would get corrected. The people who are equipped to recognize the lie, and who care to fight to get it corrected, are few compared to the army of internet trolls spreading that lie.
Eventually the note may get rewritten—but at that point the tweet is no longer trending; the operation was a success and no one even knows that it took place. Since the note gets rewritten with no history maintained, the only evidence of the original malicious, false correction would have to be in that updated note, which is obviously an unpopular choice because it makes the new note harder to read and makes future readers do extra work to untangle what happened there.
(Incidentally, one of the things that could reliably be used to combat bias—labeling tweets from accounts that are known to be associated with governments or such—was nuked by Elon right away.)
As I said your mileage may vary. This looks like something that can be improved and an exception. I'd rather have imperfect decentralized information checking than centralized information checking that is know to be partisan, biased and easily bought. But please downvote me more as it shows that what you're truly in favor is censorship and monopoly over narrative.
I do not deny your experience and I saw many useful community notes before. It took me seeing this case to understand that it is actually a bad idea, for the reasons I mentioned (illusion of absolute truth while being open to manipulation & showing no history of controversy).
Also, it is not technically decentralized, it is Twitter (a centralized platform)… If it were truly fully decentralized, it would be vulnerable to such attacks even more, right? If you are up against a totalitarian government controlling the 2nd most populous country, there can always be more people who claim the false correction. There was a minority of people who got the correction fixed, and if it was actually decentralized then how would they be able to?
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