Twitter has seen significant growth in the number of AI-generated and manipulative media getting shared on its platform. In an effort to tackle these instances, it has announced a new experiment where it will test a new feature called Notes on Media. It is essentially an expansion of Community Notes which will now cover images. The goal is to curb disinformation and avoid situations like the one where a fake image claiming to show an explosion near the Pentagon went viral on Twitter.
Twitter Community Notes for Images: How it Will Work?
The official Twitter account for Community Notes shared a thread announcing the feature and explaining its functioning. It is officially called Notes on Media and will only be available to contributors with a Writing Impact of 10 or above. These users will now see a new option that will allow them to add notes to the image shared in the tweet. It will be in addition to the existing option for adding notes to the tweet as shown in the image at the top.
The major difference here is that when a note is added to a tweet, it is visible to others only when that particular tweet appears in their timeline. But when a note is added to an image, it will be visible on all tweets with that image. This makes sense because once a manipulative image starts to get viral, people tend to share it with their own thoughts. Even culprits can create fake accounts to share an image with different wordings in the tweet.
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
Notes attached to an image will automatically appear on recent & future matching images. pic.twitter.com/89mxYU2Kir
— Community Notes (@CommunityNotes) May 30, 2023
All readers will see the note about an image in a slightly different manner. This will help them differentiate between notes meant for an image and a tweet. The text will read, “This note is about the image and could be shown on other Tweets that include this image”.
Twitter says Notes attached to an image will automatically appear on recent and future matching images. Another important thing mentioned by the team is, “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.”
Lastly, the Community Notes for media feature is currently limited to tweets with single images. The team is working on expanding the feature to videos and tweets with multiple images/videos. An exact timeline has not been shared but if the initial testing goes right, it should not take too long.
