Elon Musk’s Community Notes Feature on X is helping fight misinformation
Elon Musk's X activates 'Community Notes' program in India. Here's how it works. Researchers who study social media worry about rampant hate speech and incitements to violence; in 2023 it became prohibitively expensive for researchers to get data to study these problems.
But the lead author of this new study, behavioural scientist John Ayers of University of California, San Diego, said Community Notes data was easy to obtain. And for hashing out factual issues in fields like science and health, social scientists recommend a crowdsourcing approach, citing studies that show the power of collective intelligence. Several studies have pitted crowdsourcing against professional fact checkers and found the former work just as well for checking the accuracy of news stories.
Ayers and other researchers looked at the accuracy of X’s Community Notes, using the contentious issue of covid vaccines as a test case. The results, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed these X notes were almost always accurate and usually cited high-quality sources. The X feature relies on volunteers to flag misleading posts and add corrective commentary with links to scientific papers or media sources.
Other users can vote on the notes’ value. The old system relied on fact-checkers whose identity and scientific credentials were unknown. They could take down posts they deemed to be misinformation, ban users or use ‘shadow bans,’ by which posts are hidden without user knowledge.
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