Briefs for Tuesday

Twitter is enlisting its users to help combat misinformation on its service by flagging and notating misleading and false tweets.

The pilot program unveiled Monday, called Birdwatch, allows a preselected group of users – for now, only in the U.S. – who sign up through Twitter.

Those who want to sign up must have a U.S.-based phone carrier, verified email and phone number, and no recent Twitter rule violations.

Twitter said it wants both experts and nonexperts to write Birdwatch notes. It cited Wikipedia as a site that thrives with nonexpert contributions.

COVID job losses quadruple 2009

“In concept testing, we’ve seen non-experts write concise, helpful and easy-to-understand notes, often citing valuable expert sources,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Twitter, along with other social media companies, has been grappling how best to combat misinformation on its service. Despite tightened rules and enforcement, falsehoods about the U.S. presidential election and the coronavirus continue to spread.

GENEVA – Four times as many jobs were lost last year due to the coronavirus pandemic as during the worst part of the global financial crisis in 2009, a United Nations report said Monday.

The International Labor Organization estimated that the restrictions on businesses and public life destroyed 8.8% of all work hours around the world last year.

That is equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs – quadruple the impact of the financial crisis over a decade ago.

“This has been the most severe crisis for the world of work since The Great Depression of the 1930s. Its impact is far greater than that of the global financial crisis of 2009,” said ILO Director-General Guy Ryder. The fallout was almost equally split between reduced work hours and “unprecedented” job losses, he said.The U.N. agency noted that most people who lost work stopped looking for a job altogether, likely because of restrictions on businesses that hire in big numbers like restaurants, bars, stores, hotels and other services that depend on face-to-face interactions.

The drop in work translates to a loss of $3.7 trillion in income globally – what Ryder called an “extraordinary figure” – with women and young people taking the biggest hits of employees.

From wire reports