SOCIAL
Twitter Announces New Partnerships with Reuters and AP to Improve Information Accuracy in Trend Listings
Twitter has announced new partnerships with both the Associated Press (AP) and Reuters to help improve its efforts to elevate credible, timely information within user timelines, and slow the spread of false narratives via tweets.
As explained by Twitter:
“We are committed to making sure that when people come to Twitter to see what’s happening, they are able to easily find reliable information. Twitter will be able to expand the scale and increase the speed of our efforts to provide timely, authoritative context across the wide range of global topics and conversations that happen on Twitter every day.”
The new partnerships will tie into Twitter’s contextual explainers, which it now shows within Search, trends, Explore and via specific highlights and prompts during major events.
As you can see here, Twitter has been working to ensure that its overview explainers on topic listings are accurate and link to reliable sources, to reduce the impact, and amplification, of misinformation in tweets. Twitter also added example tweets to these listings last September.
The new partnerships with AP and Reuters will help to ensure that Twitter’s curation team is able to access real time updates around key conversations as they emerge, via their established and vetted sources, while also helping Twitter’s teams to proactively provide context on topics that are garnering widespread interest, and could potentially generate misleading information.
Essentially, Twitter will now be able to tap into the same sources that Reuters and AP utilize to stay on top of the latest news, which will add another level of reliability to its listings, and help its curators stay across emerging issues with the latest info.
It’s an important, and valuable update for Twitter’s efforts on this front, which could have a big impact on its processes.
And given that Twitter has repeatedly been identified as a key originator of misinformation, in various forms, it’s important that it does all that it can to combat this, and improve its listings in order to limit amplification. I mean, that won’t specifically counter Twitter bot armies, which can be unleashed to artificially boost discussion around a specific subject. But providing more context is another important step in what will require a wide-reaching effort.