X’s unique Community Notes feature doesn’t do enough to stop the flow of some content that a new report finds offensive.
The report Wednesday from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that out of 283 posts it reviewed, 209 didn’t receive an accurate Community Note. According to the report, a Community Note is marked as accurate if it aligns with other third-party fact-checking sites, cites sources and explains why the flagged post is inaccurate.
The 209 posts that didn’t receive accurate Community Notes accrued over 2 billion views on X and covered topics like voter fraud, the 2020 election being stolen and the Democratic Party importing illegal immigrants to vote in the 2024 election.
The report also found that posts it found misleading received 13 times as many views as X’s Community Notes, suggesting Community Notes may not receive enough circulation.
“Community Notes is just one tool among many to make a platform safe and could be improved to make the system more transparent, fair and accountable,” the report says. “But so long as platforms can choose to self-regulate, we, the users, will continue to be the subjects of failed safety experiments.”
The social media platform launched Community Notes late last year, with X owner Elon Musk praising the policy as a community-based content moderation system. Users can rate Community Notes as “helpful,” “somewhat helpful” and “not helpful.” Only those that achieve a final rating of “helpful” will be displayed to all users.
The Community Notes feature was intended to bolster X’s content moderation system. However, since taking over the site, Mr. Musk has dismantled X’s Trust and Safety teams and has made it harder to get suspended.
Conservatives applaud such moves by Mr. Musk as bolstering free speech.
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