Twitter tests Community Notes for images, videos as company value tumbles

Twitter is testing its Community Notes feature for images, as well as videos. This is part of Twitter's attempt to curb misleading AI-generated media that's floating around the microblogging website. This is an understandable move considering Twitter has become a platform for sharing manipulative and AI-generated media lately.

However, the American social media company is sparing no effort to fight manipulative media. In line with this, Twitter has introduced a new experiment, which involves testing a new feature dubbed Notes on Media. This is a slightly overhauled version of Community Notes which covers images.

It is no secret that some AI-generated images and videos are created to spread misinformation. For instance, a fake explosion video near the Pentagon went viral on Twitter not long ago. This video was created using AI technology. It is important to curb such instances before they become too difficult to control, especially since human-level AI is on the horizon.

How do Twitter Community Notes for Images work?

The official Community Notes Twitter account recently shared a thread that highlights the features and explains the functions of Notes on Media. It is worth noting that only contributors with a Writing Impact of 10 or above will have access to Notes on Media.

Eligible users will get a new option that will let them add notes to an image shared via a tweet. Likewise, an already existing option allows users to add notes to tweets. On the downside, a note added to a tweet is only visible to Twitter users when the particular tweet appears in their timeline.

However, when a qualified Twitter user adds a note to an image, it will be visible to others on all tweets that include that image. This is a significant feature given that people tend to share manipulative images with their own opinion once they start going viral.

Moreover, the folks at MySmartPrice have pointed out that wrongdoers are likely to share an image with their own views using fake Twitter accounts. Also, all readers will see a note about any manipulative image slightly differently. This will let them differentiate between notes for an image and a tweet.

Notably, the text will read, "This note is about the image and could be shown on other Tweets that include this image." According to Twitter, the Notes added to an image will be seen in all recent and future similar images. However, the team explained that the feature is likely to make mistakes in terms of matching images in the initial stage.

In other words, the Notes on Media functionality may not match every image that probably looks like a match to Twitter users. Nevertheless, the company said it will continue working to improve this to avoid erroneous matches. Also, Twitter hinted that it is planning to expand the feature soon.

It is also worth mentioning here that the Community Notes for Media feature will currently appear on tweets with single images. The feature will be expanded to videos and tweets with two or more images/videos in the coming days. Regretably, details about the exact timeline are still scarce.

Twitter's value drops

It will be interesting to see whether the new feature will give Twitter CEO Elon Musk an edge over his company's arch-rival Instagram's rumoured text-based app. To recap, Musk bought the social media platform for a whopping $44 billion (about £35,529,715,762) last year. Much to his chagrin, Twitter is now worth only about one-third of what he paid for it, according to Fidelity.

The 51-year-old business magnate reportedly admitted that he overpaid for the San Francisco-based social media company. Aside from this, he acknowledged that Twitter is worth less than half what he paid for it. However, Fidelity hasn't explained how it arrived at its new, lower valuation. Also, it is unclear whether Fidelity has access to any non-public information from Twitter.