Like balloons, Twitter is again expanding its Community Notes, which Chief Twit Elon Musk believes will be a key element in establishing the platform’s new ‘Trust and Service’ approach, seeing it potentially become a more critical provider of truth in news and information.
Don’t get us wrong; while this sounds like a noble aim, how it’ll play out remains to be seen. This latest expansion would see Community Notes move abroad, with users in more regions now able to add contextual notes and reference links to questionable claims in Tweets.
Notes Expanded
As stated in the announcement, select users in Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and the UK will now be admitted into the Community Notes program, greatly expanding the amount of local knowledge and input feeding into the Notes system. Twitter has been working to build Community Notes into a form of crowd-sourced fact-checking as a means to reduce its internal obligations when it comes to content moderation, empowering Twitter users to decide what’s acceptable and what’s not in the app.
Approved Notes contributors can add contextual explainers that are then appended to Tweets, with all users then able to rate the notes to determine whether or not they were helpful, thus influencing the trustworthiness of the Note creator. It’s a good experiment, though whether it’ll be a good replacement for human fact-checkers and moderators is a different question altogether.
Elon is pushing hard to make this a thing, which makes sense given that he has also cut thousands of moderators as part of his cost-reduction measures. However, one of the key concerns with Community Notes is that they could potentially over-simplify innately complex issues with notes that appear right but don’t really tell the whole story, which is the broader problem with modern web culture (i.e., memeing a really debated issue).
If you then apply the same process to even bigger issues, like, say, climate change, what happens then? In such cases, it might end up doing more harm than good. Giving users a reason to pause on any potential false claims is a win, but it does feel a bit concerning if you need to make qualifying statements such as those in this Tweet.
Either way, Musk sees Community Notes as part of his broader mission to make the platform the source of truth, as ruled by and for the people, regardless of the actual truth. Community Notes is part of the “citizen journalism” push, which effectively places people like Musk in positions of power to bottleneck the truth if it benefits them.
The Wrap
Apparently, that’s the mission. Given that Twitter has lost around 40% of its total ad revenue and is apparently on track for bankruptcy, it’s not looking so well. But maybe, through the added capacity of fact-checks via Community Notes, that could end up reducing the impact of false claims while saving Twitter some money in the process. The main risk to it right now is putting so much reliance on it so quickly.
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