“Watch your neighbor!”
A new crowdsourcing project promoted by social media giant Twitter as a way to correct misleading information has some troubling resemblance to surveillance methods of old.
The cutely named “Birdwatch” 2000-user pilot program, begun in January of this year, urges users to fact-check what they see on the platform. Participants can flag tweets and add notes to show their assessment of the reality or unreality represented by a particular tweet or set of tweets.
This program follows the debut of Twitter-labeled tweets in 2020.
“Under pressure to clean up its site, Twitter started labeling misleading tweets for the first time last year, a move that intensified debates about the role major social media platforms play in public discourse,” writes Elizabeth Culliford for Reuters. “It also fueled allegations from Republican lawmakers that tech companies are censoring conservatives.”
Now, proponents promote Birdwatch as a way to stem the flood of false, misleading or downright odd information confusing Twitter users – case in point: four years of a president who often took to the short-form medium to “speak directly to the American people” in ways that were often nonsensical, beyond “covfefe.”
We’ll see how much Birdwatch helps to reform Twitter. Meanwhile, a new platform called Clubhouse is innovating that time-tested practice of speaking to people verbally with audio, rather than text characters.
One author at Malaymail, writing today, refers to Clubhouse as a new “sandbox for influencers,” where people can learn more about the growing market for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) or just talk. Clubhouse is valued at $1 billion, and has 10 million users per week:
“Its popularity has been boosted by the pandemic and appearances by attention-getting figures such as Tesla founder Elon Musk and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg. …Unlike most major social media, Clubhouse lets people rest screen-weary eyes or tend to other tasks while feeling engaged in intimate conversations.”
What is the future of social media? Is it with the old guard, or newfangled options? What do you think?