Fact check: Do community notes work?
The alleged manipulation of community notes again raises questions about this form of fact-checking.
Last week Elon Musk claimed on X (previously Twitter) that “… @CommunityNotes is increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media” before highlighting a poll about support for Ukraine’s President Zelensky is not credible. Aside from the U.S. politics involved, the alleged manipulation of community notes again raises questions about this form of fact-checking.
What are community notes?
This moderation used on X was designed in 2020 to emulate professional fact-checking. It relies upon social media engagement around content to invite everyday users to check whether a claim is factual. Practically, tweets on X often appear with a fact box underneath to provide a summary showing the credibility of the content.
Despite its launch on X five years ago, there is nothing new about using the power of communities on social media to assess the credibility of content. It’s akin to a ‘Web 2.0’ peer-review process, and Wikipedia is the best-known crowd-sourcing project that relies on this type of collaborative truth searching.
Do community notes work?
Off the back of Meta’s announcement in January 2025 that it would replace professional fact-checkers with Community Notes, The London School of Economics published an article about the accuracy of this crowd-sourced approach. It referenced research that verified:
1. Community notes are found to have a 97% accuracy rating.
2. This form of fact-checking system does work on X, leading to an 80% chance that the perpetrating author deletes their original tweet.
3. … unfortunately, community notes are slow to verify information and often aren’t used.
In practice…
Modern social media algorithms are designed to show us what we want to see and engage with, leading to tribes connected by common ideologies. The best social networks do this effectively, often driving tension and conflict between communities. In practice, this means that community notes can be ineffective due to the lack of different perspectives.
For example, during the Los Angeles wildfires, a conspiracy-oriented X account baselessly claimed that authorities started the fires to destroy evidence of underground child-trafficking tunnels. The tweet posted on 9th January 2025 has 4.3 million views but still doesn’t have a community note.
What does this mean for professional communicators?
The role of the corporate website has re-emerged as your source of truth – invest here to ensure your story is heard without manipulation or influence.
It’s never been more important to track mentions of your brand and executives across multiple communications channels to protect your reputation.
The partisan leanings and nature of social networks should be considered before any engagements, especially as independent fact-checking is decommissioned.
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