I read all the community notes on Elon Musk's X account. Here's what I learned.
Community Notes, the Twitter/X fact-checks formerly known as Birdwatch, are often touted as one of the few good things to have survived the first chaotic year of Musk's ownership. These notes are user-generated, usually including links to high-quality sources. Like Reddit posts they live or die on upvotes ("helpful") and downvotes ("not helpful") — enough of the latter and they disappear. Anyone can sign up to contribute, if they don't have strikes against their account. Contributors are the only ones who get to see or vote on proposed notes before they're officially stamped on tweets.
Musk will often tout Community Notes as a sign that he cares about the quality of information on a service that is crawling with deliberate disinformation. He's smart to do so: one study has found that Community Notes increase trust in social media, and so could help bring X's fleeing users back. But he doesn't even need to put his thumb on the scale of the X algorithm to avoid them himself.
With nearly 200 million people following him, if even a small percentage of his adoring fans are signed up to rate proposed Community Notes, they can swarm the system, intercept and rate any proposed note on Musk's account as "not helpful" before he gets another badge of fact-checking shame. As in this instance, where retweeting a false story about a bomb at a Trump rally was a step too far even for his fans (the original tweet Musk quotes was deleted; the Note remains).
