The Community Notes feature is one of the few broadly well-received X changes that Elon Musk has championed. But the moderation tool still has flaws, so can it really point the way to a better social media landscape?
How Do Community Notes Work?
Community Notes (CN) is, essentially, a fact-checking feature that Twitterlaunched in 2021, under the name Birdwatch. It went fairly under the radar for a couple of years but, since Musk’s takeover and rebranding to X, Community Notes has received much more attention.
Community Notes is a crowd-sourced initiative involving unpaid volunteers. Ideally, CNs follow this process:
Why Are Community Notes So Good?
Contributors to Community Notes are pre-approved, so you must qualify against X’s criteria to join the program. In theory, this should prevent bad actors from manipulating the system, ensuring more balanced moderation.
An algorithm rates Community Notes according to a broad consensus across a variety of other contributors. This should prevent narrow views from prevailing by ensuring like-minded accounts cannot game the system by acting together.
Community Notes do not cause X to remove or edit a post. The post remains as it was except for the additional note, so accusations of censorship do not apply. Moreover, Notes help to empower ordinary users of the service which may help to increase engagement.
Possibly the most interesting aspect of Community Notes is that you can add them to adverts too.Companies posting dropshipping adswill typically be called out, as will many exaggerated or misleading claims. The danger is that, by supporting this open system of accountability, Twitter will bite the hand of the advertisers that feed it. But there’s little doubt that consumers are better off as a result.
Do Other Platforms Offer Something Similar?
Most social media platforms have some kind of moderation in addition to the terms and conditions that prevent users from abusing their system. However, few have gone as far as X in the provision of public fact-checking.
Slashdot, a social news service that began in 1997, was a pioneer of community moderation. The site uses a system of “karma” to award the power to moderate comments. If your account is in good standing it may, at random times, give you a small number of moderation points. Moderated comments can be hidden and rated with a choice of qualifiers like “Informative” and “Interesting.” Slashdot also features meta-moderation to attempt to ensure fair moderation.
Reddit uses per-community moderatorswho can approve or hide submissions and comments. Reddit users can vote comments up or down; a low-enough vote causes a comment to be hidden by default, with a message reading “comment score below threshold,” but the comment can still be viewed.
As a publisher,you can moderate YouTube commentsand reject them if you don’t like them. This can help to prevent abuse, but it also means that dissenting or critical comments can be removed, which lessens accountability. However,YouTube recently announcedthat it will launch a feature similar to Community Notes shortly.
Facebook is inherently less public than X, so there’s less of a need for fact-checking. However, Facebook posts can still exert influence and spread misinformation; like most social media platforms, Facebook lets you report a post that’s inappropriate or abusive.
What Alternatives Are There?
There are many fact-checking websitesthat keep an eye on high-profile, contentious statements. They have traditionally dealt more with old media, but many now also cover the most prominent claims made on social media, including X.
The main differentiator between Community Notes and other efforts to fact-check content is independence. X hosting public criticism of content that it also hosts is a strange situation, especially given that the Community Notes algorithms are not totally transparent. Should we even trust X to deliver accurate fact-checking?
However, consider the alternative. Fact-checking hosted elsewhere may be more independent, but unless anyone sees it, it has little value. By empowering users to add context to each other’s comments, at the point of origin, X is setting an example that Facebook, Bluesky, and others would be wise to follow.
