Keith Coleman, Twitter’s VP of Product:

Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading and write notes that provide informative context. We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable. Eventually we aim to make notes visible directly on Tweets for the global Twitter audience, when there is consensus from a broad and diverse set of contributors.

Birdwatch will exists as a separate site, where moderators can flag content, rate and discuss misleading information.

Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny got an early look for NBC News and noted it feels like Twitter is trying to bring a Wikipedia-like feel to moderation. Twitter it planning on rolling the feature out slowly and adapting based on usage. Collins notes that “brigading” is going to be a huge challenge for a system like this, where extremists could hang out on a forum like 4Chan (or Twitter itself) and then attack people or views they want suppressed. Any system that prides itself on openness, whether it’s a social network or a democracy, has to guard itself against bad faith attacks that use the very openness of that system¹.

Much like Facebook’s Oversight Board, this feels like a too-late reaction but very revealing about Twitter.