X owner Elon Musk announced an update for Community Notes that aims to address concerns about the value of the crowd-sourced fact-checks that get added to some posts a user has engaged with.
As per Musk: “We will be releasing a new Community Notes feature that sends you an X Chat message if a post you interacted with is corrected.”
The updated communications flow could help to make users more aware of corrections to posts that they’ve shared or commented on, helping to amplify the new information.
But at the same time, X already sends notifications to users in this exact scenario.
In 2023, X announced that it would send a notification to any user who had engaged with a post that later had a Community Note appended to it.
As X explained at the time: “Sometimes a note appears on a post after you’ve seen it. To help, Community Notes sends notifications to people who have engaged with a post that later receives a note.”
This seems to be the exact issue Musk is referring to, which was already addressed three years back.
Maybe sending out specific DMs for each update will help to boost awareness of corrections and ensure that more people know about relevant post updates.
Though it still won’t address the fundamental flaw with the Community Notes model.
The key error is that Community Notes seeks to account for political bias among contributors. Meaning, a user’s personal leanings, based on a systematic assessment of their stance, could influence whether their suggested note is relevant or not.
As outlined within the Community Notes guidelines: “Community Notes doesn’t work by majority rules. To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, notes require agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings.”
In other words, the Community Notes model weighs whether a note should be displayed to X users or not, depending on whether people from opposing political viewpoints agree that a note is necessary.
Which is fine for non-controversial situations. But what about, say, whether the 2020 U.S. election was rigged? Will people from both sides of the political aisle agree on this?
If agreement can’t be established, a note won’t be shown, which means that much of the most harmful political misinformation is still allowed to run rampant in the app.
Which has had a big impact on the overall effectiveness of Community Notes.
According to an analysis conducted by Bloomberg last year, fewer than 10% of the Community Notes submitted via X’s notes system are shown in the app, primarily because of this qualifier. In 2024, the Center for Countering Digital Hate found similar data in its own analysis. Its research found that 74% of the proposed notes that appeared to be accurate and rightful requests for amendment were never displayed to users.
This remains the fundamental flaw of the system, and there’s no easy way to correct this. That is, unless the platform itself wants to weigh in on some of these topics, but that goes against the ethos of why Community Notes was added in the first place.
So essentially, Elon Musk has proposed a new notification process that replicates an existing function, and might help to increase awareness of Community Notes on posts that people have shared or replied to in the past.
That’s a good thing, but the actual effectiveness may not end up being significant.
