Twitter today announced its partnership with news organizations The Associated Press and Reuters in order to increase its efforts to highlight reliable news and information on the platform. Twitter's Curation team will now be able leverage the expertise of partner organizations to provide more context to Twitter's news and trends. They can also help with Twitters use of public service announcements during high visibility events and misinformation labels.The Curation team is currently adding information to Top Trends and other news from Twitter's Explore tab. This team also helps to rank search results for certain keywords and hashtags on Twitter.They may also assist with prompts in the Explore tab of the Home Timeline that relate to major events such as public health emergencies (such a pandemic) and other events like elections. They may also assist with misinformation labels appearing on tweets that can remain visible on Twitter but are labeled using informative context from authoritative sources. These tweets include those that violate Twitter's rules about manipulated media, election integrity or COVID-19.The team is independent from Twitters Trust and Safety team. This team determines when tweets violate Twitters guidelines and must take punitive actions like removal or bans. Twitter confirmed that neither Reuters nor the AP will be involved in these sorts of enforcement decisions.Twitter claims it can increase the speed and scope of adding additional information to tweets by working with Reuters and AP, which are also partners with Facebook for fact checks. This means that Twitter's team can quickly access trusted sources for contextual information to enhance conversations on Twitter, especially in news situations and times when facts are uncertain.This could be helpful in preventing misinformation from spreading virally, rather than waiting for the facts to correct incorrect tweets.Birdwatch, Twitter's crowdsourced fact-checking platform Birdwatch, will also use feedback from AP or Reuters to determine the quality information shared by Birdwatch participants.Twitter explained that the Curation team will work with news organizations to provide context for stories and conversations. They also help to identify stories that need additional context. This context can appear in many places on Twitter, such as in tweets, search in Explore and in curated selections called Twitter Moments.Twitter's in-real-time nature and the use of high-profile individuals who try to manipulate truth for their own ends has made it difficult to handle misinformation. It has tried many different features to stop misinformation spreading, including disabling one click retweets and adding fact checks to account bannings. Birdwatch, the latest attempt to add context to tweets is not a system that relies on trusted friends but is a decentralized effort at managing misinformation.AP has a long history working with Twitter and other platforms to increase the reach of factual journalism. Tom Januszewski (VP Global Business Development at AP), stated this in a statement regarding the new agreement. This is fundamental to our mission. He said that APs speed and scale are key to adding context to online conversations. Online conversations can be greatly enhanced by easy access to the facts.Trust, accuracy, and impartiality are the core of everything Reuters does every single day. They provide billions with the information they need for smart decisions. These values are also the driving force behind our commitment to stop misinformation spreading. Baker stated that we are excited to work with Twitter to share our global and local expertise in order to provide reliable information to the public discussion.The collaborations will initially focus on English-language content, but the company states that it plans to expand the work over time to include more languages and time zones. Twitter told us that it will be evaluating new opportunities to recruit collaborators who can support additional languages during the initial phase.
