In a move that will not exactly ensure trust among individuals outside of the liberal sphere, Twitter announced Monday that it is teaming up with two left-leaning news outlets to "expand our efforts to identify and elevate credible information" on its platform.
Twitter has signed a deal with both Reuters and the Associated Press to help elevate what they deem "accurate information." Twitter said they will look to feature information from "reliable" resources, debunk circulating misinformation and explain the site's trending patterns.
"We are committed to making sure that when people come to Twitter to see what’s happening, they are able to easily find reliable information," the social media platform said in a blog post. "Twitter will be able to expand the scale and increase the speed of our efforts to provide timely, authoritative context across the wide range of global topics and conversations that happen on Twitter every day."
The news outlets will also assist in providing context on subjects of widespread interest, Twitter said. This is an effort to "contextualize developing discourse" before such content goes viral.
The news outlets, who both are also fact-checking partners with Facebook, said that promoting objective journalism is at the core of their values.
"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 user-generated content newsgathering at Reuters. "Those values also drive our commitment to stopping the spread of misinformation. We're excited to partner with Twitter to leverage our deep global and local expertise to serve the public conversation with reliable information."
"AP has a long history of working closely with Twitter, along with other platforms, to expand the reach of factual journalism," said Tom Januszewski, vice president of global business development at the AP. "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."
This comes amid the Biden administration's efforts to crackdown on online misinformation, with the president even saying that "outrageous misinformation" spread on social media platforms is killing people.
Earlier this month, Democrat Sens. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and Ben Ray Luján (N.M.) introduced legislation that would hold Twitter and other social media companies accountable for allowing "health-related misinformation" to spread on their sites amid "public health emergencies."
