Study finds most of X’s Community Notes never see the light of day
A study finds 90% of X’s Community Notes never get published, raising concerns about Elon Musk’s anti-misinformation tool amid leadership turmoil.
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A sweeping study of X’s Community Notes reveals that over 90 percent of the platform’s crowd-sourced fact-checking posts never get published, raising questions about Elon Musk’s signature misinformation-fighting tool even as the platform navigates leadership turmoil and the challenges of viral falsehoods.
The report, released Wednesday by the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas, analyzed the complete public dataset of 1.76 million Community Notes published on X between January 2021 and March 2025. Despite being marketed as a scalable and transparent tool for combating misinformation, the system’s publication rate remains strikingly low: more than 90 percent of submitted notes fail to reach the public, as per reports citing the study.
For a program marketed as fast, scalable, and transparent, these figures should raise serious concerns, the researchers said, according to AFP.
The study comes amid turbulence at X, where CEO Linda Yaccarino announced her resignation this week after two years leading the company through a turbulent overhaul under Elon Musk. Her exit coincides with fresh controversy over X’s AI chatbot Grok, which drew fire for anti-Semitic remarks praising Adolf Hitler and posts insulting Islam.
X’s Community Notes system, now mirrored by platforms including Meta and TikTok, relies on volunteers to add context or corrections to posts, with publication contingent on receiving “helpful” ratings from users with diverse perspectives. However, as the volume of submitted notes has grown, the system has become clogged, particularly in English, with many notes remaining unrated or lacking consensus, effectively leaving them in limbo.
Among English-language notes, the publication rate fell from 9.5 percent in 2023 to just 4.9 percent in early 2025, the report found. Spanish-language notes fared better, with rates increasing from 3.6 percent to 7.1 percent in the same period.
One of the system’s most prolific contributors was not a human but a bot-like account flagging crypto scams, submitting more than 43,000 notes between 2021 and March 2025, with only 3.1 percent going live.
As X grapples with leadership changes and the challenges of misinformation in a high-velocity news environment, the limitations of its flagship fact-checking program highlight the complexities facing social media platforms seeking scalable solutions to content moderation.
