X Expands Community Notes Program, Adds ‘Top Author’ Badge for Highly Rated Contributors

The X team continues to expand the provision of its Community Notes feature, with users in 18 more regions now in a position to apply to be a part of the volunteer moderation program.

As noted by X, that now signifies that Community Notes can be found in 44 regions, significantly expanding the reach and capability of this system.

Users can apply to be a part of the Community Notes team (note: the link still goes to a ‘birdwatch’ URL), which then enables them so as to add contextual notes and links to false or misleading content within the app. Those notes are then reviewed by other Community Notes team members, which, if approved, then sees that more information appended to the tweet, which might help to cut back the spread of false claims.

Along with this, X can also be adding a brand new ‘Top Author’ badge in an effort to lend more credibility to notes from highly rated contributors.

That might make sure that Top Author notes usually tend to gain consensus, and are due to this fact more prone to be displayed when needed within the app.

Community Notes has emerged as a key element of Elon Musk’s ‘freedom of speech, not reach’ ethos on the newly re-branded X app, with the platform putting increased reliance on Notes as a method to police what’s true and what’s not, as judged by the X community.

Which just isn’t at all times a great solution, especially if you happen to’re moving away from human moderation (note: Elon also says that X has not significantly reduced moderation staff, despite culling 80% of its workforce). But Community Notes has proven to be an efficient deterrent in some cases, in reducing the spread of misinformation, with AI-generated content being one element that’s commonly and accurately noted.

However the broader flaws within the system could possibly be significant.

In line with evaluation by Poynter Institute, the overwhelming majority of the Community Notes created are never viewable within the app, resulting from the way in which wherein the Community Notes review system is structured, requiring consensus from users with opposing perspectives in an effort to be displayed.

The method effectively requires ‘ideological consensus’, which suggests that users on the political left and right must agree that that note is crucial for it to be shown.

As explained by Poynter’s Alex Mahadevan:

“Essentially, it requires a cross-ideological agreement on truth, and in an increasingly partisan environment, achieving that consensus is sort of unattainable.”

Twitter determines a Notes contributor’s political leaning based on past behavior within the app, which can also be not at all times the perfect proxy, but based on this, the system then requires responses from each side to approve a note.

In Poynter’s research, it found that this has been useful for highlighting low-stakes content, like clarifying funny or satirical tweets, or highlighting AI-generated images, things that everybody is mostly in agreement on. But a few of the most harmful misinformation, along more divisive lines (e.g. COVID vaccine impacts, election interference, gender debate), is rarely going to get that critical consensus. Thus, the vast majority of Community Notes, where they’re most needed, are never displayed.

Users saw this in effect earlier this week, when a tweet from Elon Musk regarding COVID vaccines was Community Noted, but then that note disappeared from the app a day later.

That prompted many to suggest that Musk had forced his team to remove the note, but actually, it was removed resulting from the Community Notes voting system, which, again, requires consensus.

The instance highlights broader concerns with the notes system as a reliable means for policing misinformation. And with the X team putting increased emphasis on this element, that may lead to more misleading tweets remaining lively within the app, despite contributors attempting to flag them.

So while Community Notes may be useful in some respects, research suggests that it’s not effective in lots of key areas, and that the X team must be implementing more secondary checking measures to cut back such exposure. Which Elon is unlikely to be open to, given the reduced cost of counting on volunteer contributions, and his overall approach to free speech. But with X also trying to win back advertisers, it may have an improved system to guarantee protected ad placement.

Straight away, nonetheless, X is moving ahead with the broader expansion of Community Notes, together with additional tweaks to revise the system. And with increasingly AI-generated images flooding the net, that’ll still be useful, but it surely’s unlikely to be the all-encompassing solution that X appears to be hoping for.