Twitter Partners with Big Media to Combat 'Misinformation'

Twitter is partnering with Reuters and the Associated Press in a new scheme to combat alleged “misinformation,” following in Facebook’s footsteps by outsourcing part of the company’s “fact-checking” to corporate media organizations.

The goal, according to Twitter, is to help the company feed “reliable content” to its users, although the news organizations will not be involved in removing alleged “misinformation” from the platform, a role that remains the purview of Twitter’s powerful Trust & Safety team.

According to Twitter, the partnership with AP and Reuters is aimed at “ensuring that credible information is available in real time around key conversations as they emerge on Twitter, especially where facts are in dispute or when Twitter’s Curation team doesn’t have the specific expertise or access to a high enough volume of reputable reporting on Twitter.”

Twitter also says it wants to “contextualize” emerging conversations, and anticipate the conversations before they start.

Twitter says one of its goals is “proactively providing context on topics garnering widespread interest including those that could potentially generate misleading information. Rather than waiting until something goes viral, Twitter will contextualize developing discourse at pace with or in anticipation of the public conversation.”

Tom Januszewski, VP of global business development at the AP, said: “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.”

Unlike Facebook, Twitter has maintained its own fact-checking regime instead of outsourcing the task (and responsibility for the results) to third parties. During the 2020 election, President Trump was repeatedly fact-checked by the platform, while misinformation from the left, as well as Chinese propagandists, often got a pass.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.