- X has relied on Community Notes, a crowdsourced fact-checking feature, to address misinformation.
- Critics have said the approach is flawed, but Elon Musk and his biggest fans stand by the feature.
- But even Musk’s supporters call out Community Notes when it corrects them.
When Elon Musk gutted the content moderation team last year at what was still Twitter, some of the billionaire’s biggest fans hailed the move as a new era of free, unfiltered, and unmoderated speech on the platform.
Replacing the people burdened with the difficult task of tackling misinformation was going to be an existing feature at Twitter, now X, called BirdWatch — a fact-checking program that relies on user input.
“Birdwatch (soon to be renamed Community Notes) has incredible potential for improving information accuracy on Twitter!” Musk said last November.
Musk and fans of the new Twitter have stood by the feature, arguing that it’s a preferred alternative to removing misinformation altogether. But even X fanboys have had to come to terms with the shortcomings of Community Notes, which critics have pointed out since Musk’s takeover.
Conservative blogger Ian Miles Cheong, who regularly responds to Musk’s posts and has about 865,000 followers on X, likes to highlight when Democratic politicians, mainstream news outlets, and posts that generally appear to support left-wing views are checked by Community Notes.
“Community Notes does not miss,” he has said in multiple variations — until it did.
Responding to an X user who appeared to support the idea of decolonization in Western societies, the blogger wrote in response: “These people want us dead. They make no secret of it. It’s time to wake up.”
A Community Note soon appeared under his post: “Ian Miles Cheong is Malaysian and has never been to the US. Malaysia is not a Western nation and, in fact, as somewhere between 63% and 75% Muslim population, depending on the survey. He would be closer to the ‘they’ than the ‘us’ in this statement.”
Cheong has since taken down the post but called the note “insane,” claiming that he has visited the US multiple times and accused the Community Notes feature of being gamed.
“I didn’t realize CN (Community Notes) could be used to troll people you disagree with politically,” he wrote.
Cheong told Business Insider in an email that he doesn’t feel Community Notes is unreliable “most of the time” and that, although it can be “occasionally gamed by the masses,” the feature does a “good job” at tackling misinformation and adding context.
He said most of his frustration about the notes is when he feels “no context is necessary,” such as in the case of a satirical meme.
Critics are skeptical of Community Notes
Some may argue that the fact that no X user, including Musk himself, is immune to a correction from Community Notes is a testament to the feature’s capability, but critics have repeatedly pointed out the flaws of the system behind the feature.
In December 2022, current and former employees at Twitter told Bloomberg that the feature, as it was designed at the time, can’t address divisive posts, even if they’re clearly lies, because a note needs consensus from users across the political spectrum. Data showed that about 96% of fact-checking notes contributed by Community Notes did not end up being posted for the public, the report said.
Half a year later, Poynter Institute’s MediaWise Director Alex Mahadevan said that the program still suffers from visibility issues because of how Community Notes operates. Typical X users could only see about 8.5% of the total notes that have been contributed by participating users, he said.
The same system has caused X to be slower to act on posts related to the Israel-Hamas war that broke out in October and have been debunked but viewed by hundreds of thousands of users without an appendaged note.
A Wired investigation published in October, which included ex-Twitter employees and a current Community Notes contributor, also found that Community Notes is vulnerable to manipulation by outside players, the notes themselves can be a source of misinformation, and the approval process behind notes is still murky.
Elon Musk’s biggest fans voice concerns
Some of Musk’s strongest supporters who have bought into the X owner’s so-called “free speech absolutist” vision on the platform have argued about Community Notes’ limitations.
Tech investor David Sacks, who hailed “Free Speech is back in America” after X reinstated Donald Trump’s account last November, said the feature was unable to handle “info war and psyops at scale” after a note corrected his post that claimed American troops were operating in Ukraine.
Seth Dillon, owner and chief executive of The Babylon Bee, a conservative satirical news website that was also banned pre-Musk, said that Community Notes is “not perfect, but it’s working.” Dillon who has called Musk the “foremost defender of free speech in our country,” added that “it’s even more entertaining than it is helpful.”
Corrections and the slightly snarky tone that can be behind some of the notes have become content in themselves, so much so that an entire page dedicated to highlighting “community notes violating people” has attracted more than 735,000 followers.
Cheong told BI Community Notes is “not perfect and it remains a work in progress, but believes it’s “leagues ahead of fact-checking organizations.”
Likewise, Musk continues to announce “improvements” to Community Notes. On Thursday, he said on X that users from Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan can now be a part of the program. The feature’s algorithm also continues to be tweaked, according to Community Notes’ X page.
Musk claimed in May that the feature will one day be able to combat deepfakes or media generated by artificial intelligence.
Musk and a spokesperson for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
