Twitter is partnering with the Associated Press (AP) and Reuters to help identify credible information on the social media platform.

The BigTech company said that it is committed to making sure Twitter users can easily access reliable information.

According to Twitter, currently its curation team helps give people context to make informed decisions about what they see on the site.

“When large or rapidly growing conversations happen on Twitter that may be noteworthy, controversial, sensitive, or may contain potentially misleading information, Twitter’s Curation team sources and elevates relevant context from reliable sources,” wrote Joanna Geary, Twitter’s senior director of curation, on the company’s blog.

Twitter claimed that the new collaboration will increase its capacity to add reliable context to conversations happening on the platform.

Geary said that the partnership would ensure that credible information is available in real time around key conversations as they emerge on Twitter, especially where facts are in dispute or when the business’ curation team doesn’t have the specific expertise or access to a high enough volume of reputable reporting on Twitter.

Through the new collaboration, Twitter aims to anticipate and identify emerging conversation.
“Proactively providing context on topics garnering widespread interest including those that could potentially generate misleading information,” added Geary. “Rather than waiting until something goes viral, Twitter will contextualise developing discourse at pace with or in anticipation of the public conversation.”

Meanwhile, the company wants to improve the effectiveness of product features by supporting product experimentation and existing iniatives where additional credible context could make its “work better.” For example, Birdwatch will use feedback from AP and Reuters as one way to assess the quality of information elevated by Birdwatch participants.

“Trust, accuracy and impartiality are at the heart of what Reuters does every day, providing billions of people with the information they need to make smart decisions,” said Hazel Baker, head of UGC newsgathering, Reuters. “Those values also drive our commitment to stopping the spread of misinformation.”

Baker added: “We're excited to partner with Twitter to leverage our deep global and local expertise to serve the public conversation with reliable information.”

Tom Januszewski, vice president of global business development at AP said: “AP has a long history of working closely with Twitter, along with other platforms, to expand the reach of factual journalism. This work is core to our mission. 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.”

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