Twitter expands Community Notes to Brazil

San Francisco: Micro-blogging platform Twitter on Friday announced that it has expanded its crowd-sourced fact-checking programme "Community Notes" to Brazil, and it is the first country in which users will be able to "write and rate notes predominantly in a different primary language.

The company tweeted from its @CommunityNotes account: "Welcome contributors in Brazil! We're excited to bring Community Notes to one of the largest communities on Twitter, and the first to write and rate notes predominantly in a different primary language."

"We continue to expand Community Notes globally. Coming soon: Japan and a first group of Spanish-speaking countries. As always, we're paying close attention to ensure notes are helpful to people from different points of view around the world."

In January this year, the company had expanded its crowd-sourced fact-checking programme to four countries-- the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.

Community Notes aims to allow users to add more context to tweets through links and reports. It has been widely used to debunk or correct claims made in popular tweets.

Twitter introduced the social fact-checking program last year in the US under "Birdwatch", but after Elon Musk started managing Twitter, he renamed "Birdwatch" to "Community Notes".

In November last year, the company had rolled out an algorithm update that identifies more low-quality Community Notes, which will result in the suspension of contributor status for those who write unhelpful annotations to provide further clarification and context on tweets.