WHO WATCHES THE BIRDWATCHERS? CREATING A ROGUE ARCHIVE OF TWITTER’S ONGOING COLLAPSE

Abstract

Community Notes (formerly named “Birdwatch”) is Twitter’s crowdsourced fact-checking program to combat mis- and dis-information. By signing up to be a Birdwatch contributor, a user can add contextual notes and commentary to other tweets as well as rate the contributions of others. User submissions to the Community Notes program also serve as metacommentary on the platform more generally. Beyond their fact-checking role, Birdwatch notes also illuminate how some users perceived Elon Musk’s recent purchase of the platform and how the subsequent changes aligned with their own understandings of what the platform ought to be. This paper describes Birdwatch Archive, a project to archive Twitter’s Community Notes program by parsing the data that Twitter publicly releases from the Birdwatch program and displaying it in a searchable and organized fashion that is accessible and useful to researchers. Using the anonymous user identification strings from each TSV file, the website enables researchers to assess how frequently users contribute to the Community Notes program by grouping notes and ratings they have provided. Even as Twitter continues to devolve and collapse, we can try to learn from how users described and understood the platform. When studying major platforms, we cannot rely solely upon the data made accessible by the platform itself. Instead, we must look for opportunities to create “rogue archives” of online settings, which includes turning sources that are not as frequently viewed by most users.