o of them, a hundred thousand views. Now in terms of viewers, probably there'll be a hundred thousand of them by the end of the day. Right now it's views, but there'll probably be that many viewers.

And I thought to myself, I wonder if these guys know that they just went international. They literally were being streamed all over the planet with just this little thing in my hand and a good cell signal. And that's it. And suddenly their show was worldwide. And here's the funny part. I don't think they know it. So yesterday they gave a show to the entire planet, tens of thousands of audience members. The only people who don't know it is the people who gave the show. Nobody told them. So I just think that's an interesting little slice of life there.

All right. Interesting thing. Twitter is introducing a new feature which is getting mixed reviews before anybody even sees it. That's the way things go. And the new feature is trying to get at these censorship problems. Well, not censorship so much as fake news. It's more of a fake news solution or attempted solution.

Now of course you know from my other Periscopes that I'm always, always in favor of testing a new solution. So those of you who are saying, my God, it's the end of the world, this new feature will just be bad like everything else in the world, you might be right. It's entirely possible that Twitter would roll out a new feature and it might make things worse. Anything could happen, right? It's an interesting world. But don't you have to first of all appreciate testing new stuff? I think you've got to give it to them for that, right? I mean, you can criticize the social media platforms for a billion different things and that would be valid. But you can't criticize them for testing solutions. That part I like. So let's keep that part.

Now what could go wrong? Plenty, right? That's the problem. What could go wrong with this new feature? So the feature, I don't know the details, but in broad strokes it allows you to add context to other people's tweets. So if I understand it correctly, you'd be able to say, here's another story that's the counterpoint to that, or some background that would make the story look different.

Now how is that bad? Now some people are saying, well, you know that we already have that. It's called the comments. You can already leave a comment. But how often do you read the comments on a tweet? I mean seriously, how often do you dig into the comments of a tweet? I do often, but not as a percentage. As a percentage of the time I usually just read the tweets. Probably eighty percent of the time. Now I see what you're saying that you often, some of you often read the tweets. So I would say twenty percent of the time I dig in. And it depends on the tweet, right? If I think I understand the tweet and there's nothing to talk about, I'm not going to dig into the comments. And those are the dangerous ones. The dangerous ones are the ones that I think I know the story by reading the headline.

If I'm being honest, half of the news I consume is just the headline because the rest of the story is unnecessary, right? Most of the time the headline is all you need to know. There's nothing else beyond the headline that has any value at all usually. Now sometimes you're wrong. Sometimes there are lots of important nuggets in the story. But we're busy people and I have to decide when do I dig into the comments and look for it and when do I just read the headline and move on. So the practical reality of it is that we read the headlines and move on.

Now wouldn't it be nice if instead of having to dig through some comment that could be in a string with hundreds or thousands of comments, wouldn't it be nice if for every story that had a need for context it was just right there? Click this button to see the other side or click this button to see the top rated counterpoints. Something like that.

Now I do think that there's some way to solve this problem. I'll tell you a way that probably won't work. And I saw Jack Posobiec was tweeting an old tweet of mine in which you side by side you can see how Wikipedia talks about the fine people hoax and then you can see the transcript, the actual transcript from the event. And you can see how different they are. And I don't know the current situation of the Wikipedia story about the fine people hoax, but I was involved with at least one of the editors who was trying to fix that some time ago. And every time it got fixed to match the transcript, that's it, just fixing it to match what the transcript says, editors would re-edit it and turn it back to the fake hoax, to the whole side of me. And it would happen almost instantly, as if somebody was just sitting on it waiting to change it back to the hoax.

Now I don't know where it is now, but at one point it was almost just where I would put it. In other words, it stated that the president said he wasn't talking about the neo-Nazis, etc. So once you say that clearly, that debunks the hoax. So what happens if this new Twitter feature, this Birdwatch, is anything like Wikipedia? It's a problem, right? Because this is a very specific observable example where Wikipedia, because of its business model, if you can call it a business, because of its model, the public can distort the news.

Now ideally they can't distort it forever because there will be enough people coming in to correct it that the correction will eventually overcome any errors. And that normally is the way it works. But I think in this narrow realm of politics the trolls or the people who want to protect the incorrect story are just too strong. There's just too many of them. So this is the one realm on which Wikipedia is difficult to self-correct because there's too much incentive to keep it incorrect, which wouldn't apply to most of its content, right?

But I don't think that Birdwatch is heading to the Wikipedia model. The Wikipedia model tries to get you one story that's correct. I don't think Twitter is trying to do that, and it would be a mistake if they did. I think they're trying to show you what people say if it's a reasonable counterpoint and it can be expressed that way. So if what Twitter does is surface the points and the counterpoints