X Adds Notifications for Posts With a Community Note

Is Community Notes the singular solution to effective content moderation on social apps? No.

Is it a handy complement that may assist in addressing various types of misinformation and misrepresentation, while also enabling users to raised highlight concerns in posts? Definitely.

The challenge lies somewhere in between, as Elon looks to push Notes as X’s predominant safety net to handle every type of concerns, while analysts proceed to highlight flaws within the Community Notes system, which is resulting in more misleading content being amplified within the app.

Though it will help.

Today, X has announced that it should now distribute more notifications to users who’ve engaged with a post that’s later had a Community Note appended.

As per X:

“Sometimes a note appears on a post after you’ve seen it. To assist, Community Notes sends notifications to individuals who have engaged with a post that later receives a note. We’ve now scaled it as much as handle even essentially the most visible and highly-engaged posts, so more of you shall be (and are already) seeing these.”

That is an excellent addition, which is able to help to in any case raise questions amongst X users in regards to the content that they’ve seen, replied to, Liked, etc.

If a post, for instance, gave them the impression that something had happened, when it actually hadn’t, these sorts of follow-ups may very well be very effective in slowing the spread of false reports, which might also include deepfakes, AI-generated images, etc.

There’s rather a lot to love about Community Notes on this respect. But again, the issue isn’t a lot that the Notes are overly unreliable, nor that they don’t serve a purpose. It’s greater than X is putting an excessive amount of faith in the method being the savior for its misinformation issues, by letting users determine what’s true and what’s not, without X management stepping in, or no less than, not stepping in at the identical level that Twitter’s past health and safety team had been.

But plenty of this comes all the way down to perception. As per its “Twitter Files” internal exploration shortly after the corporate modified hands, Elon and Co. outlined what they perceived to be massive corruption in information flow, because the past Twitter team sought to suppress certain information on the behest of presidency officials.

But that’s probably not what the documents showed. What the insights did show is that Twitter’s health and safety team worked with various official authorities to make sure that it remained aware of related concerns. A few of those it actioned, most it didn’t, however the reports demonstrated what most would view as a responsible approach to managing key discussions, and the amplification of such, through official partnerships that might have some bearing on future strategy.

The issue is, this also involved a difficulty that Elon himself believes was a conspiracy theory, within the COVID pandemic.

In coping with COVID, the Twitter team made decisions based on the most effective information it had on the time, and on reflection, a few of those calls may not have been correct. But that’s on reflection, and within the midst of an unprecedented pandemic, the team were doing what they may. But that’s all of the evidence that Elon and his team needed to flag this as mass censorship, marking Twitter as a vehicle for “accepted narratives”, which he’s now determined that X won’t ever be.

Which is why he wants Community Notes to work, in order that some information deemed unfaithful, false, misleading, a few of that may still get through. Because you possibly can’t trust the mainstream discussion, but you possibly can trust the people, in Musk’s view.

The issue with that’s Community Notes doesn’t really work in highlighting plenty of misinformation since it’s based on political consensus, meaning that individuals from either side of the political spectrum must agree on notes before they’re displayed.

On a spread of highly divisive issues, that agreement won’t ever come. Like COVID, the war in Israel, the war in Ukraine, border protection, etc. A few of these are hardline topics, that nobody’s going to concede. So relevant Notes are never shown, and never seen, resulting in broad circulation of misleading claims, based on X’s own system.

Is that a greater final result than having X’s own team step in? It’s inconceivable to say, but I do feel that, sooner or later, that is going to guide to significant issues in consequence.

So while there are good points to the method, and there may be a definite value in Community Notes, and notifications like these latest retrospective prompts, the method isn’t what Elon and Co. think. Which may very well be problematic.

Conceptually, there’s a logic there, and other approaches, like Reddit’s up and downvotes system, have provided similar results.   

But Community Notes is unlikely to be the shield that Musk seems to consider, or need to consider, as he reforms the app.