While it’s not perfect, and it remains a contentious element for a range of reasons, X’s Community Notes program continues to expand, with a million X users now actively contributing to its Notes submission and approval process.
That’s a lot of community input, which is crucial to the effective operation of the Community Notes model, while as you can see in the clip above, X is also touting the fact that both Meta and TikTok have also moved to implement similar Community Notes-style approaches to complement their own moderation systems.
Which means that Community Notes is a success, right? The fact that these other platforms are taking cues from X suggests that X’s model is working, and is driving better outcomes overall.
Right?
Well…
Among the various changes implemented at X under Elon Musk, Community Notes is largely considered to be among the most successful, ushering in a new approach to content moderation that enables X’s user base to decide what should be allowed to be published, and what should be restricted, as opposed to leaving that decision up to management.
That ideally addresses a key concern in owner bias, and Musk has repeatedly accused previous Twitter management of using such for their own purpose.
Conceptually, this makes sense. Instead of Musk and Co. deciding what’s acceptable and what’s not, and what should be corrected or left unchallenged, the X community now does this, doing away with more heavy-handed monitoring and restriction by X’s own moderation team.
Having a million contributors also reduces the labor load that X needs to pay external contractors for, so ideally, this system both empowers the community, and reduces costs, improving the X experience overall.
But that’s not always how it’s playing out.
For example, according to analysis conducted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) last year, 73% of Community Notes related to political topics are never displayed on X, despite these notes providing valuable context.
As you can see, based on the CCDH’s analysis, Community Notes should have been displayed on various posts about political topics to provide important context, but because X contributors couldn’t agree on whether a note was needed, those markers were never displayed in the app.
Which is a key flaw, and while both X and Meta have repeatedly pointed to studies which show that Community Notes can reduce the spread of misleading posts by more than 60%, while user-generated annotations are perceived as significantly more trustworthy than simple misinformation flags, these statements are only relevant when a note is actually displayed in the first place.
And most Community Notes on X are not displayed.
Another study conducted earlier this year by Spanish fact-checking site Maldita found that 85% of all Community Notes are never displayed to X users, due largely to the fact that Notes are only shown when there is agreement that a Note is necessary between contributors of opposing political backgrounds.
Add to this the fact that X’s Community Notes system has also been infiltrated by organized groups of contributors who collaborate to up and downvote notes, and you can see how this system is not foolproof, and is enabling certain elements of misinformation to proliferate on X.
To be fair, X’s Community Notes team has continued to improve the system, including in addressing concerns with turnaround times, in order to ensure that Community Notes are displayed on posts before they can have a broad impact.
The Community Notes process is getting better, but the need for political agreement, and the fact that it can be manipulated by mobs, does point to significant concern within the broader notes approach.
And now Meta’s rolling it out, to a 5x bigger audience than X has.
Don’t get me wrong, there is definite value in Community Notes, and the fact that there are now a million Notes contributors on X is significant. But it should be used as a complement to third-party fact-checking and internal moderation tools, not a replacement.
