Elon Musk's Community Notes Feature on X Is Working | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk's Community Notes Feature on X Is Working

bloomberg.com

18 pointskristianp13 comments

Community Notes, formerly known as Birdwatch, is a feature on X (formerly Twitter) where contributors can add context such as fact-checks under a post, image or video. It is a community-driven content moderation program, intended to provide helpful and informative context, based on a crowd-sourced system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Notes

I kind of wonder if something like this could be added to amazon reviews. You know, the one-star reviews complaining about shipping instead of the product.

FWIW, there is Mozilla's Fakespot extension.

Community note: Community notes started as Birdwatch in 2020 and got released to wider community in March 2022. Elon Musk initiated the take over in April 2023, with any effects taking much longer. While Community notes got much more popular under Elon Musk, they're not "Elon Musk's feature".

Aside from that, it's one of the social media features I really love and they seem to work surprisingly well. They have some issues and sometimes are slow to appear while people keep retweeting lies, but... it's better than anything else I've seen so far. The self-balancing (less impact from votes from people in a given segment who may be too biased on it) is probably what keeps it in check.

Agreed. The best thing about them in my view is that community notes can be attached to ads, something which doesn't seem to get much mention when it's discussed.

This feature predates Musk. It used to be called Bird Watch.

I don't use X, so just wondering how similar/different is it to Wikipedia Talk pages?

Community notes get displayed right underneath the tweet they’re correcting. Probably the most unique thing about them (relative to most other forms of correction/warning/note/reply/discussion on the internet) is they have almost the same visibility and reach as their subject, ie pretty much anyone who sees the original tweet will also see the note.

It has a voting system to decide if a note is shown. Wikipedia doesn't do that - anyone can write on the talk page and to some extent anyone can edit the actual page though with restrictions. I'd say the X system is more democratic. With Wikipedia certain people can end up as editors and control things a bit.

F.D. Flam and Bloomberg.

Seems strange media is praising Elon.

It will be interesting to see how it stands up to adversarial attacks.

I worry that people will find a way to game it.

It seems to stand up quite well so far. I think they categorise the accounts that can vote based on thing like tweets and vote history and then on say a Trump post they'll try to survey both pro and anti Trump folk and only ok the note if both groups say its ok.

I have found it mostly accurate and much better than the old method of just banning misinformation outright.

The problem is that they don't show up until the post has often had the majority of the views it will get. Notes often take days to go through the process before they get shown, by which point most of the harm has been done.

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