Hello, everybody, welcome to Twitter's session at RNA 21. We are so thrilled to be here with you today. We miss our RNA family so much. And we hope to see you all again soon. And we hope that you're all well and safe. Today we're here to talk about going beyond 280 characters. My name is Nikita Patel. And I oversee print and digital news partnerships at Twitter here in the US, my pronouns are she her, and I'm wearing a purple shirt because that's my favorite color. I'm also on our nice board of directors and chair of the online journalism awards. So hopefully you'll hear more about that later. I'm here with my co host today, Eric Zuckerman, who oversees broadcast news partnerships here in the US. You'll get to hear more from Eric shortly. So we have a great session lined up for you today, we're going to go through the 10 things that you need to know since we have been very busy at Twitter lately. We're gonna then talk about our long form content strategy, and then talk about spaces for newsrooms and journalists. So let's dive in. The first thing you need to know is about a brand new program that we just launched on World Press Freedom Day. It is called follow local journalists. Every single year on World Press Freedom Day, we Twitter always host some kind of global campaign where we're making sure that press freedom and conversations about journalism are top of mind. This year, we decided to use World Press Freedom Day as a springboard for our new initiative about local journalism. And a World Press Freedom Day. Our goal was to make sure that conversation about local journalists was top of mind. The reason we decided to come up with this program and launch it is because we firmly believe that local journalists deserve a national and a global spotlight. As part of this project, we launched a print campaign. Here you can see four page ad with a QR code that links to a Twitter list of local journalists around the country. We run these ads in 28 cities around the country across USA Today networks, newspapers, and mcclatchy newspapers. These ads are also accompanied by digital ads, which linked to each newsrooms Twitter list of their journalists also. Great news is that this whole campaign didn't drive a ton of conversation on Twitter, we saw conversation about wild Press Freedom Day and tweets, over 95% more year over year. Of all the conversation about World Press Freedom Day, we saw an increase of 40%. Going beyond conversation was the sentiment to we were helping to drive positive conversation. Positive to neutral conversation and sentiment about follow local journalists was 98%. And most importantly, the main intent of this campaign on this day was to drive followers to local journalists. On well Press Freedom Day, journalists saw an uptick of 38% new followers than an average day on Twitter. So what is follow local journalists all about? Soon, you'll see profiles of local journalists and newsrooms on media.twitter.com. We'll be sharing more Twitter lesson at mentioning local journalists on Twitter news. You'll see spaces where I plan to have spaces with local journalists and encourage them to do so also. We'll also continue the drumbeat of trainings that we do with local newsrooms and journalists, and of course industry events. One of the reasons why we're here today at RNA is to connect with all of you. And we'll be discussing follow local journalists and implementing various things and other key industry events throughout the year. The second thing that you need to know is about verification. This is everybody's favorite topic. Hopefully you all know that we opened up public verification a few weeks ago. So now anyone that wants to be verified, can apply in app themselves as long as they meet the guidelines. Don't fret if you don't have this in your app yet. This is rolling out slowly. So hopefully, you'll have this soon. If you haven't used this and apply and hit any bumps in the road, don't worry, then too, you can also reach out to your social teams, your audience teams, the chances are that they're in touch with us, and we can help to triage issues. The third thing to know is a project called bird watch that we recently launched. In terms of our misinformation roadmap. As you may know, we started actioning on content towards the US elections and COVID-19 when it comes to misinformation. Now with this new program with burdwan, we're taking a community driven approach to having users actually flag misleading content to us, for us to moderate.