Comment by davidclark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidclark | Hacker News Reader

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How would it be trivial? Can you describe in a more specific way?

The data I can find says it was last updated 9:02 PM Jan. 5, 2025 (presumably America/Chicago from my browser). That’s a >2 day window as of writing this comment.

Not throwing any accusation, just trying to understand the technicals.

If there was any manipulation of community notes in the last 2 days, how would we know?

If there’s manipulation of this data before it is published, such as ratings or notes never hitting these data files, how would we know?

Maybe, an individual could check to see their own contributions are included in updates to the published data. Is that sufficiently common such that it would get caught?

Community note data I can find (log in required): https://x.com/i/communitynotes/download-data

> If there was any manipulation of community notes in the last 2 days, how would we know?

You can't know until the data is published. 2 days isn't that long though. Just wait a couple more days for the next data dump, then run the algorithm and compare the results to what the X UI was showing at that time.

> If there’s manipulation of this data before it is published, such as ratings or notes never hitting these data files, how would we know?

That would be a bit more sneaky than just outright removing notes. As you noted, you'd need a user whose ratings or notes were omitted from the dump to notice and come forward. Or perhaps with careful analysis you could prove that the manipulated data could not have resulted in the allegedly removed note being shown and then later not shown, indicating something fishy happened.

Theoretically if X wanted to improve on this system, they could go even further and implement something like certificate transparency (append-only log verified by a publicly distributed merkle tree), or create an independent third party organization that users interact with to submit and rate notes, rather than that happening through X's UI. Given the threat model though, I feel like the UX and complexity trade-offs of that wouldn't be worth it. Open sourcing the data and algorithm as X has is already far more transparency than we get from any competing social media company.

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