Study Finds That the Majority of Community Notes are Never Displayed on X

Yeah, I’m not sure that Community Notes is going to be the misinformation-addressing solution that Mark Zuckerberg and his Meta safety crew seem to be presenting.

With Meta now allowing users to sign-up to become contributors to its coming Community Notes program, which will see it do away with official, third-party fact checks, a new study, conducted by Spanish fact-checking site Maldita, has found that Community Notes on X are heavily reliant on the same sources that Meta has been using up till now for its third-party fact-checking process.

As reported by Poynter:

“The study ranked professional fact-checkers among the three most cited sources on Community Notes […] The study also found that users trust notes citing an accredited organization more, helping them appear faster on misleading posts and allowing misinformation to be addressed before it spreads further.”

So Community Notes on X are more effective when professional fact-checking resources are referenced, which seemingly undermines Meta’s decision to do away with these as official fact-checking resources.

Though at the same time, Meta could argue that this report shows that it doesn’t need to have official agreements with these groups, as users tend to cite them either way.

But what stood out to me from this report was a more damning fact about Community Notes as a misinformation-combating element:

“Despite the higher trust in community notes citing fact checks, 85% of notes remain invisible to users on X. On average, only 8.3% of proposed notes become visible, rising to as much as 15.2% when linked to a verification organization.”

The vast majority of Community Notes are never displayed, despite contributors having to go through an approval process to ensure that they are valuable contributors.

So why aren’t the majority of Notes shown to X users:

“The reason for the low visibility rate is that Community Notes requires agreement among users with different political views before a note is shown. Maldita’s study recommends that platforms revise or, in Meta’s case, select a lower threshold of agreement to prioritize factual accuracy.”

This is the biggest flaw of the Community Notes approach, that it requires consensus of people from opposing political perspectives before a Note is shown to users in the app.

The logic for this makes sense. If you just accept every note as submitted, then political activists could use it to censor opposing viewpoints.

But in application, it makes it virtually impossible to slow the spread of many verifiably incorrect claims. Because on some issues, people from either side of the political aisle simply will not agree.

Which, really, is a fundamental truth of any adversarial political system.

Though it’s especially relevant for the Trump Administration, which has a long history of amplifying misleading or incorrect information. And once Trump says something, it’s accepted as truth by his supporters, which means that if a Community Note is submitted to correct such, it’s not going to be displayed, because of the opposing political perspective requirement.  

Which, as the data above shows, is already holding back the vast majority of Notes on X, and at Meta’s scale, it’s going to become an even bigger problem.

And that’s before you consider that X’s Community Notes system has already been infiltrated by organized groups of contributors who collaborate to up and downvote Notes, based on political and/or philosophical alignment, which even Elon himself has acknowledged.

Essentially, Community Notes, while valuable in theory, and in many cases where political division is not a factor, is going to be useless in most other instances.

And at a time where the world is being inundated with half-truths, and narratives driven by ulterior motives, that could be devastating on a broader scale.