Elon Musk’s X tests letting users request Community Notes on bad posts

🌈 Abstract

The article discusses the expansion of Twitter's fact-checking service, now called Community Notes, to allow users on Elon Musk's X platform to request fact-checking on problematic posts. The key points are:

🙋 Q&A

[01] Expansion of Community Notes to X

1. What are the key details about the expansion of Community Notes to X?

• X has launched a pilot test on the web-based version of the platform to allow users to request fact-checking from Community Notes contributors on any X post.
• If X receives 5 or more requests within 24 hours, a Community Note will be added to the post.
• Only X users with verified phone numbers will be eligible to request Community Notes, and they will be limited to 5 requests per day.
• The limit on requests may change based on whether the requests successfully result in helpful notes or are on posts that don't need a note.
• Once 5 or more requests are received, top Community Notes contributors with diverse views will be alerted to respond.

2. How does X determine which Community Notes contributors are eligible to respond?

• Contributors need to have at least 4% of their notes rated as "helpful" and meet X's standards for the impact of their notes.
• A contributor's Top Writer status can change as their notes are rated by others.

3. What criteria does X use to consider a Community Note as "helpful"?

• The note must contain accurate, high-quality information and help inform people's understanding of the subject matter.
• X partners with professional reviewers from the Associated Press and Reuters to gauge the accuracy of the notes.
• X also monitors whether notes marked as helpful by top writers match what general X users mark as helpful.
• X acknowledges that not all notes will be perceived as helpful by all people, but the goal is for notes marked as "Helpful" to be seen as such by a wide range of people.

[02] Pilot Phase and Evaluation

1. What is the plan for the pilot phase of the Community Notes expansion to X?

• During the pilot, half of the top contributors will be allowed to request notes, which will help X evaluate whether it is beneficial for contributors to have both the ability to write and request notes.
• The criteria for requesting a note have been designed to be simple for the pilot, but X expects the criteria to evolve with the goal of making requests frequently valuable to contributors and not "noisy".

2. What data does X have on the effectiveness of Community Notes so far?

• The most recent data is from 2022 when the service was still called Birdwatch on Twitter.
• That data showed that users were 20-40% less likely to agree with the substance of a potentially misleading tweet when they saw a Community Note, compared to someone who saw the tweet alone.
• Twitter's internal data at the time also estimated that people on Twitter who saw notes were 15-35% less likely to like or retweet a tweet than someone who saw the tweet alone.