X to fight spiking disinformation by letting users request Community Notes.
Continuing to evolve the fact-checking service that launched as Twitter’s Birdwatch, X has announced that Community Notes can now be requested to clarify problematic posts spreading on Elon Musk’s platform.
X’s Community Notes account confirmed late Thursday that, due to “popular demand,” X had launched a pilot test on the web-based version of the platform. The test is active now and the same functionality will be “coming soon” to Android and iOS, the Community Notes account said.
Through the current web-based pilot, if you’re an eligible user, you can click on the “•••” menu on any X post on the web and request fact-checking from one of Community Notes’ top contributors, X explained. If X receives five or more requests within 24 hours of the post going live, a Community Note will be added.
Only X users with verified phone numbers will be eligible to request Community Notes, X said, and to start, users will be limited to five requests a day.
“The limit may increase if requests successfully result in helpful notes, or may decrease if requests are on posts that people don’t agree need a note,” X’s website said. “This helps prevent spam and keep note writers focused on posts that could use helpful notes.”
Once X receives five or more requests for a Community Note within a single day, top contributors with diverse views will be alerted to respond. On X, top contributors are constantly changing, as their notes are voted as either helpful or not. If at least 4 percent of their notes are rated “helpful,” X explained on its site, and the impact of their notes meets X standards, they can be eligible to receive alerts.
“A contributor’s Top Writer status can always change as their notes are rated by others,” X’s website said.
Ultimately, X considers notes helpful if they “contain accurate, high-quality information” and “help inform people’s understanding of the subject matter in posts,” X said on another part of its site. To gauge the former, X said that the platform partners with “professional reviewers” from the Associated Press and Reuters. X also continually monitors whether notes marked helpful by top writers match what general X users marked as helpful.
“We don’t expect all notes to be perceived as helpful by all people all the time,” X’s website said. “Instead, the goal is to ensure that on average notes that earn the status of Helpful are likely to be seen as helpful by a wide range of people from different points of view, and not only be seen as helpful by people from one viewpoint.”
X will also be allowing half of the top contributors to request notes during the pilot phase, which X said will help the platform evaluate “whether it is beneficial for Community Notes contributors to have both the ability to write notes and request notes.”
According to X, the criteria for requesting a note have intentionally been designed to be simple during the pilot stage, but X expects “these criteria to evolve, with the goal that requests are frequently found valuable to contributors, and not noisy.”
It’s hard to tell from the outside looking in how helpful Community Notes are to X users. The most recent Community Notes survey data that X points to is from 2022 when the platform was still called Twitter and the fact-checking service was still called Birdwatch.
That data showed that “on average,” users were “20–40 percent less likely to agree with the substance of a potentially misleading Tweet than someone who sees the Tweet alone.” And based on Twitter’s “internal data” at that time, the platform also estimated that “people on Twitter who see notes are, on average, 15–35 percent less likely to Like or Retweet a Tweet than someone who sees the Tweet alone.”
Requests may help combat spiking misinformation
X’s announcement that users can now request Community Notes comes after the World Economic Forum (WEF) this year warned that misinformation and disinformation have emerged “as the most severe global risk anticipated over the next two years.”
The WEF reported that the “widespread use of misinformation and disinformation” during pivotal elections globally could result in “violent protests and hate crimes to civil confrontation and terrorism.” It could also further polarize perceptions of reality that heighten risks of “domestic propaganda and censorship,” as “governments could be increasingly empowered to control information based on what they determine to be ‘true.’”
As X’s owner, Musk has made it clear that he will resist government overreach attempting to restrict “lawful but awful” speech on X. But some officials, perhaps most notably European Union regulators, have questioned whether Community Notes are truly effective in combating misinformation, as compared to removing misleading content to prevent viral spread.
Last year, the EU’s commissioner for the internal market, Thierry Breton, met with Musk to discuss how the Digital Services Act’s “goals of transparency, accountability & accuracy of information are aligned” with Musk’s reliance on Community Notes.
One person with direct knowledge of their talks claimed that EU regulators thought that “Community Notes is not a terrible idea but Musk needs to prove that it works” after his platform’s 2022 report to the EU admitted that the company is “keenly aware that a product like this can be vulnerable to abuse and manipulation.”
X has said that it has guardrails to combat abuse and manipulation of Community Notes, including an “alert threshold” that prompts an X investigation into notes suddenly found to have “low or declining quality.” If the problem is considered urgent, X may respond by temporarily “raising the threshold required for notes to be publicly visible on a post,” pausing the scoring of notes, or pausing the notes displayed “for viewers outside enrolled Community Notes contributors.”
According to X, all notes deemed to be helpful after all ratings are tallied are otherwise “locked after two weeks.”
It may not always be easy to tell when X is limiting Community Notes’ functionality, but X claimed that a status section on this page would be updated if “Community Notes is operating with a system-wide remediation in place.”
“Community Notes is operating normally,” that page confirms currently.
Unclear if Community Notes influence Grok
The EU meetings seemed to prompt Musk to take at least one major step to limit misleading posts by relying on Community Notes. In October, Musk announced that “any posts that are corrected by @CommunityNotes” will “become ineligible for revenue share.”
“The idea is to maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism,” Musk said, warning that “any attempts to weaponize @CommunityNotes to demonetize people will be immediately obvious, because all code and data is open source.”
This triggered backlash from some creators who wondered if X could distinguish between Community Notes that provide context or verify the accuracy of posts rather than fact-checking them. Or if X would demonetize posts where Community Notes were added to make a clever joke, in the original spirit of Twitter.
As of May, X has said that Community Notes has attracted “more than 500,000 contributors in 70 countries worldwide” and their “notes have been seen over 360 million times globally.” But as Musk continues to tout X as the best news source online in part due to Community Notes, it remains unclear how, if at all, Community Notes influence X’s latest news-dispensing machine: its chatbot Grok.
This week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Grok—which Musk has hyped as “the new model of news,” aggregating “input from millions of users” on X—has been spouting misinformation. It seems that Grok, like other chatbots, sometimes struggles to discern jokes and misinformation from legitimate news, most recently resulting in Grok amplifying misleading posts about the recent Donald Trump shooting.
X did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment on how Community Notes are used to keep Grok from confusing jokes with accurate news reports.