Twitter partners with AP and Reuters to address misinformation on its platform

However, the team operates separately from Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, which determines when tweets violate Twitter’s guidelines and punitive action, like removal or bans, must be taken, Twitter confirmed that neither the AP nor Reuters will be involved in those sorts of enforcement decisions.

Image Credits: Twitter

By working more directly with AP and Reuters, who also partner with Facebook on fact checks, Twitter says it will be able to increase the speed and scale to which it’s able to add this additional information to tweets and elsewhere on its platform. In particular, that means in times where news is breaking and when facts are in dispute as a story emerges, Twitter’s own team will be able to quickly turn to these more trusted sources to improve how contextual information is added to the conversations taking place on Twitter.

This could also be useful in stopping misinformation from going viral, instead of waiting until after the fact to correct misleading tweets.

Twitter’s new crowdsourced fact-checking system Birdwatch will also leverage feedback from AP and Reuters to help determine the quality of information shared by Birdwatch participants.

The work will see the Curation team working with the news organizations not just to add context to stories and conversations, but also to help identify which stories need context added, Twitter told us. This added context could appear in many different places on Twitter, including on tweets, search, in Explore, and in curated selections, called Twitter Moments.

Twitter has often struggled with handling misinformation on its platform due its real-time nature and use by high-profile figures, who attempt to manipulate the truth for their own ends. To date, it has experimented with many features to slow or stop the spread of misinformation from disabling one-click retweets, to adding fact checks, to banning accounts, and more. Birdwatch is the latest effort to add context to tweets, but the system is a decentralized attempt at handling misinformation — not one that relies on trusted partners.

“AP has a long history of working closely with Twitter, along with other platforms, to expand the reach of factual journalism,” noted Tom Januszewski, vice president of Global Business Development at AP, in a statement about the new agreement. “This work is core to our mission. 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,” he said.

“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,” added Hazel Baker, the head of UGC Newsgathering at Reuters. “Those values also drive our commitment to stopping the spread of misinformation. We’re excited to partner with Twitter to leverage our deep global and local expertise to serve the public conversation with reliable information,” Baker said.

Initially, the collaborations will focus on English-language content on Twitter, but the company says it expects the work to grow over time to support more languages and timezones. We’re told that, during this initial phase, Twitter will evaluate new opportunities to onboard collaborators that can support additional languages.