Love it or hate it, it’s still probably safe to argue that one of the best things to have come out of Elon Musk owning Twitter before he renamed it to X is Community Notes. For the unfamiliar, it’s a feature added to essentially crowdsource fact-checking on the platform. It had existed during the Jack Dorsey era of the bird site, called Birdwatch, but it only ever existed as part of a US-exclusive pilot. These days, it’s available worldwide, and is more than just necessary now that the platform is encouraging rage-baiting. It looks like YouTube is doing the same, with an as-of-yet unnamed feature.
The way it works on YouTube is for the most part the same as it did on X. Users can submit a note to clarify what’s shown in a video if they find it confusing on inaccurate. Selected users will see the option to “add note” under eligible videos. To quote an email that 9to5Google claims to have seen “your contributions will be reviewed by others with a wide range of views to ensure their quality and helpfulness before being added to the information panel below the video”.
Also like the former bird platform, YouTube’s take on the feature will make it so that a note will only be published if it gets rated as helpful by a “wide range of people”. One criteria to this is to have “raters who’ve historically had different perspectives on notes now agree”, though this seems liable to dilute the pool of people who would have “different perspectives” down the line.
Aye YouTube is adding community notes pic.twitter.com/xVOw9yEzhJ
— Ian Zelbo (@ianzelbo) August 7, 2024
To be fair, the video hosting platform that Google now owns announced the initiative all the way back in June. But as the aforementioned report notes, more people are sharing getting an invitation to participate. All that being said, it remains to be seen if this will remain a pilot program for much longer, or if a general rollout is incoming.
(Source: Google [1], [2], @Ianzelbo / X, 9to5Google)
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