Twitter testing new feature to identify misleading media

Elon Musk-run Twitter is testing a new feature -- "Notes on Media", which will make it easier for people to identify potentially misleading media.

The company is experimenting with Community Notes for media, which will utilise the site's crowd-sourced fact checks to provide valuable insights on particular photos and video clips.

"From AI-generated images to manipulated videos, it's common to come across misleading media. Today we're piloting a feature that puts a superpower into contributors' hands: Notes on Media," Twitter's Community Notes tweeted on Tuesday.

"Notes attached to an image will automatically appear on recent & future matching images," it added.

Users will see a new option on some Tweets to mark their notes as "About the image".

This option can be selected when they believe the media is potentially misleading in itself, regardless of which Tweet it is featured in, according to the company.

Moreover, the microblogging platform said, "Raters and readers will see notes that authors marked as 'about the image' slightly differently, so it's clear to everyone that they should be interpreted as about the media, not the specific Tweet. Ratings can help identify cases where a note may not apply to a specific Tweet".

Currently, this feature supports tweets with a single image, and the company is working on to expand it to 'videos' and 'tweets with multiple images/videos'.

Moreover, Twitter acknowledges that it will take some time to perfect its image matching.

"It's currently intended to err on the side of precision when matching images, which means it likely won't match every image that looks like a match to you. We will work to tune this to expand coverage while avoiding erroneous matches," the company said.