Community Notes Fail to Tackle Misinformation on X, Report Shows

Meta has initiated the first phase of its Community Notes rollout, a system designed to supplant third-party fact-checkers and empower users to combat the spread of misinformation. However, a recent Bloomberg report has shed light on significant flaws within the current Community Notes system utilized on X, which serves as the foundation for Meta’s evolving approach.

Bloomberg’s extensive analysis of over one million Community Notes listed in X’s system reveals that a staggering majority of these notes remain unseen by users. Despite many of these unpublished notes being assessed as both helpful and accurate, they are never displayed within the app, raising concerns about the system’s efficacy in promoting reliable information.

Bloomberg states:

“A Bloomberg Opinion analysis of 1.1 million Community Notes — written in English, from the start of 2023 to February 2025 — shows that the system has fallen well short of counteracting the incentives, both political and financial, for lying, and allowing people to lie, on X. Furthermore, many of the most cited sources of information that make Community Notes function are under relentless and prolonged attack — by Musk, the Trump administration, and a political environment that has undermined the credibility of truly trustworthy sources of information.”

According to the findings from Bloomberg, it appears that fewer than 10% of the Community Notes submitted through X’s system are ever made visible in the app. This low visibility primarily stems from the requirement that all notes must achieve consensus among users with differing political views to be displayed. This stipulation significantly hinders the dissemination of critical information.

X elaborates on this process:

“Community Notes assesses ‘different perspectives’ entirely based on how people have rated notes in the past; Community Notes does not ask about or use any other information to do this (e.g., demographics like location, gender, or political affiliation, or data from X such as follows or posts). This is based on the intuition that Contributors who tend to rate the same notes similarly are likely to have more similar perspectives, while contributors who rate notes differently are likely to have different perspectives. If people who typically disagree in their ratings agree that a given note is helpful, it’s probably a good indicator the note is helpful to people from different points of view.”

This approach means that notes addressing the most contentious political misinformation often go unseen, leaving significant falsehoods unchallenged and untouched by the potential benefits of crowd-sourced fact-checking.

Similar findings were reported by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which analyzed X’s Community Notes system last October. Their analysis revealed that 74% of the proposed notes deemed accurate and legitimate requests for amendments were never displayed to users, highlighting serious issues with the system’s functioning.

As illustrated in this chart, it becomes evident why notes concerning certain topics fail to achieve cross-political consensus. These narratives often represent the most dangerous forms of misinformation, leading to social unrest, distrust, and deep divisions within society.

Moreover, many of these narratives are entirely false, yet Community Notes proves ineffective in curtailing their amplification on a platform boasting 250 million daily users. As it stands, this system is expected to become the primary mechanism for combating similar misinformation, especially as it transitions to a platform with 12 times the user base.

Another study, conducted by the Spanish fact-checking organization Maldita and released earlier this year, indicated that 85% of notes remain invisible to users on X, further reinforcing the concerns about the effectiveness of the Community Notes system.

Some proponents argue that these statistics illustrate that the Community Notes approach is functioning as intended by filtering out biased and unnecessary censorship. However, rejection rates ranging from 80% to 90% raise questions about the efficiency and effectiveness of this program. The CCDH report also highlights that it independently assessed the legitimacy of notes and concluded that many deserved to be displayed to counter misleading information.

Additionally, it has been reported that X’s Community Notes system faces infiltration by organized groups of contributors who collaborate to upvote and downvote notes, further complicating the integrity of the process.

This issue was also addressed in Bloomberg’s analysis:

“From a sample of 2,674 notes about Russia and Ukraine in 2024, the data suggests more than 40% were unpublished after initial publication. Removals were driven by the disappearance of 229 out of 392 notes on posts by Russian government officials or state-run media accounts, based on analysis of posts that were still up on X at the time of writing.”

Incredibly, almost half of the Community Notes that were both appended to and approved by contributors on posts from Russian state media accounts later vanished, due to disputes among other contributors. This raises serious questions about the reliability of the system.

Such occurrences seem to go beyond mere glitches or coincidences.

To some extent, there will always be a degree of erroneous or malicious activity within the Community Notes framework, given the intentionally low barriers for contributor entry. To become a contributor, one merely needs an account free of reports and active for a certain duration. After that, a simple agreement to act truthfully allows users to join the system.

Thus, gaining access to the Community Notes group is relatively easy, and it remains uncertain whether Meta will adopt similar open criteria for its contributors.

This accessibility is crucial, as it allows average users to contribute to the assessment of what is true, what is not, and which claims warrant additional contextual information.

Consequently, both X and Meta can distance themselves from any controversies regarding content amplification, relying instead on community inputs to guide such decisions.

This approach may benefit the companies by appearing more aligned with community expectations, thereby reducing accusations of biased censorship.

However, it is essential to recognize that certain facts are indisputable and backed by substantial evidence yet continue to be debated in political discourse.

In a time when even the President is prone to amplifying misleading and incorrect reports, it becomes particularly troubling for Meta to transition to a similar model.

With Facebook’s user base reaching 3 billion, its influence far surpasses that of X, heightening the risk that misleading reports could gain traction among diverse user communities.

For instance, consider Russia’s claim that Nazis are seizing control in Ukraine, a narrative used to justify its military actions. This assertion has been widely discussed among right-wing politicians as part of efforts to diminish American support for Ukraine, yet researchers and academics have debunked it, providing definitive evidence against any political upheaval associated with Nazism or fascism in Ukraine.

However, this assertion is unlikely to achieve cross-political consensus due to inherent ideological and confirmation biases, leading to significant misinformation challenges.

Could widespread misinformation like this diminish support for opposition against Russia, facilitating certain political factions in weakening resistance to such narratives? This is a question we will soon have to confront, likely realizing the implications too late.