X Celebrates New Milestone As Community Notes Attains More Than 500k Contributors
Popular social media app X is celebrating yet another milestone. This time around, it has to do with the platform’s crowd-sourced feature for fact-checking that’s called Community Notes.
This new feature has a whopping number of contributors that are now going beyond the 500k mark. So you can only begin to imagine how many minds are working toward feeding the system with notes.
As mentioned by the company through a post published on the X app, there are close to 500k contributors on Community Notes that are spread across 70 different countries in the world.
When you take out a second to reflect on this, you realize how 2023 had 37k while in just a few months of this year, it’s gone up by so much. So yes, the pace of growth as X explained is immense and certainly, the addition of different languages daily must be acknowledged as well.
The feature that was once popular as Birdwatch on Twitter was designed and headed by former Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. He was the head of the firm in 2021.
The rollout allowed users on the app to give rise to fact-checking services and even make amendments through the assistance of citations and a wide range of references shown in-stream.
The whole throughs linked to this is an expansion of the app’s ability to work against misinformation and prevent its spread. On the contrary, we need to talk about how so much research on this front revealed that it could deter amplifying fake reports.
In another study rolled out by the company itself, X users tend to engage in reposting a particular post 61% less after it gets edited from Community Notes. Meanwhile, all posts get deleted at a higher rate after a Community Note is linked to it. And lastly, Community Notes are seen as much more trustworthy options than the usual effect of flagging content for misinformation.
From these facts and figures, we can see how the value of the entire Community Notes system regarding the contribution of fact-checking and edits for posts is immense. The fact that users can enable it to fact-check and clarify posts, knowing that it would produce positivity and eliminate risks is huge.
But we must mention how several other types of studies prove that community notes aren’t too great when it comes to keeping misinformation at bay on this platform.
Critics have long argued about how the process is very tiresome and slow in pace in regards to really putting misinformation to rest.
This might be related to the process being very slow to prevent fake information spread before it already does the damage online. The system’s requirements for X mean Notes need approval from those as well who continue to oppose political opinions before getting published on the platform.
This certainly has a serious impact. As per a recently published study rolled out by MediaWise in 2023, close to 8.5% of the entire Community Notes feature was portrayed through the platform. There were a lot of controversial topics in discussion that never got the right type of fact-checking due to the mere fact that they didn’t reach an agreement.
Today, X has come a long way with this service but it’s just the start as a lot more needs to be done in regards to the refinement of smaller details. For instance, the time required for Notes to be displayed on this platform must be reduced.
Meanwhile, other requirements such as reviews as well as agreements linked to Community Notes are failing in terms of dispelling reports. This is right before can go viral by being amplified.
On the other hand, topics might exist where Notes cannot reach as it does not have the right consensus in place. And it’s not a huge issue when you consider Community Notes as it’s just designed to assist the app’s internal system for moderating content online.
But with the company clearly putting greater emphasis on checking content by this means, eliminating human power and instead relying on such services would give rise to flaws in the future.
As we already are aware, the EU has already rolled out requests for explanations from the app in regards to why the whole moderation workforce took a massive decline in such a short period.
As a whole, Musk ordered X to reduce in-house staff by 80% and these figures are to date.
The X app has reduced 80% of the entire workforce since Elon Musk had full control of the platform. So many people have hailed Musk for this technique to reduce costs while having little effect on the app itself, if not internally but certainly externally.
Image: DIW-Aigen
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