Twitter is collaborating with the Associated Press (AP) and Reuters to expand its efforts to identify and elevate credible information on the social media platform.
Twitter said it was committed to making sure that when people came on the platform to see what’s happening, they were able to easily find reliable information.
During this initial phase of the program, AP and Reuters will focus on English-language content.
“Trust, accuracy and impartiality are at the heart of what Reuters does every day, providing billions of people with the information they need to make smart decisions. Those values also drive our commitment to stopping the spread of misinformation,” said Hazel Baker, Head of UGC Newsgathering, Reuters.
“We’re excited to partner with Twitter to leverage our deep global and local expertise to serve the public conversation with reliable information.”
The collaboration is an expansion of AP’s robust news verification efforts, including work to add context to misleading content and reduce the circulation of misinformation online.
“AP has a long history of working closely with Twitter, along with other platforms, to expand the reach of factual journalism. This work is core to our mission,” said Tom Januszewski, AP vice president of global business development. “We are particularly excited about leveraging AP’s scale and speed to add context to online conversations, which can benefit from easy access to the facts.”
Twitter’s Curation team helps give people context to make informed decisions about what they see on it. When large or rapidly growing conversations happen on Twitter that may be noteworthy, controversial, sensitive, or may contain potentially misleading information, the curation team sources and elevates relevant context from reliable sources.
Tweets from AP and Reuters will be used to inform Twitter Moments, adding context to conversations happening on the social network and helping users to better understand complex topics.
People currently see this added context and reliable information in Trends, Explore Tab, Search and Prompts on the platform.
It also extends to Labels. Sometimes a Tweet violates the company’s Synthetic and Manipulated Media, COVID-19 or Civic Integrity misinformation rules, but may remain visible on the platform. In those instances, a label may be added to the Tweet that links to a Moment with informative context on the topic or to the Twitter Rules.
The scope of this program is independent of the work Twitter’s Trust & Safety teams do to determine whether Tweets are in violation of the Twitter Rules. AP and Reuters will not be involved in enforcement decisions.
In the statement, Twitter added: “We expect our efforts to grow over time and the nature of the work may evolve as we learn, observe, and scale our efforts to provide support across languages and timezones, globally.
“This program is just one part of our ongoing efforts to help people understand the conversation happening on our service. People experience a range of public conversations on Twitter every day, and we’re committed to continuing our work to elevate credible information and context.”
