San Francisco, Sep 8 (IANS): After launching its community-driven content moderation programme Birdwatch, microblogging site Twitter is now rolling out an updated Birdwatch onboarding process that better incentivises contributors to write and rate notes in a thoughtful way.

Birdwatch is a collaborative way to add helpful context to potentially misleading Tweets and keep people better informed.

"New Birdwatch contributors who have met the eligibility criteria will begin with an initial Rating Impact score of zero, which they can increase by consistently rating other contributors' notes and reliably identifying those that are Helpful and Not Helpful," the company said in a blogpost.

"Once a contributor's score has risen to five, they can start writing notes," it added.

The platform said that contributors can further increase their Writing and Rating Impact scores by both writing Helpful notes and continuing to rate notes written by others.

Repeatedly writing notes that reach a status of Not Helpful, however, will result in a decreasing score and could temporarily lock a contributor's note writing ability.

Birdwatch programme is made up of a group of people, or contributors, who help identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading and write notes that provide informative context.

Only notes that are rated Helpful by a diverse group of contributors, or that "bridge" across groups of people who have tended to disagree in their past ratings, are made visible on Twitter.

The programme began testing in 2021 and is regularly being updated and improved thanks to analysis from our research team and feedback from our academic advisory board and Birdwatch contributors.