On Thursday, February 20, 2025 Elon Musk tweeted that X ’Community Notes” are “increasingly being gamed by governments and legacy media.” But back in January, Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta is dropping fact-checking in favor of community notes: “We’ve seen this approach work on X.” So does it stop disinformation or not? And is it gameable?
Even before Meta’s announcement that it was ending fact-checking in favor of a Twitter-style community notes approach or Musk’s tweet in relation to the war in Ukraine, researchers at CITP were looking at the pluses and minuses of both systems. “I think they’re complementary approaches, and could be helpfully used in conjunction,” said Princeton Computer Science Ph.D student Madelyne Xiao. She’s currently working with Associate Professor Jonathan Mayer and new Assistant Professor Manoel Horta Ribeiro to understand how community notes work under the hood. Previous research has shown that Community Notes on X can be manipulated by coordinated groups (including adversarial nations), with groups working together to upvote or downvote notes on any topic.
Xiao thinks that the political turmoil surrounding Meta’s announcement hardened people into two camps. The debate has “…unhelpfully positioned (human) fact-checking as a content moderation strategy contra notes-like systems.” They should be used in conjunction: “Neither system is flawless! Both have much room for improvement!”
Added Computer Science grad student Varun Rao, “I think it risks setting the stage for regulators and others to dismiss Community Notes as insufficient.” That might cause other platforms to drop this tool, when they should see it as “a promising avenue for content moderation innovation.”
Community Notes could potentially help reduce bias in moderation since adding a note requires consensus between individuals with a history of differing views. However, it can be slow to surface fact checks on divisive content that goes viral quickly, a point that Xiao seconded.
TechTakes is a series where we ask members of the CITP community to comment on tech and tech policy-related news. TechTakes is moderated by Steven Kelts, CITP Associated Faculty and lecturer in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), and Lydia Owens, CITP Outreach and Programming Coordinator.
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