Why are Community Notes so Good?

A News Source of, by, and for the People

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, now X, in October 2022 his arrival brought with it the elevation of a previously little-used feature called Birdwatch. With this feature, incorrect, misleading, or false information could be rectified not by anonymous fact-checkers but directly by members of the community itself. In addition, this correction was made not by suppressing the incorrect information but by adding information for context. This feature was quickly renamed “Community Notes.”

Right from the start Community Notes felt different than a fact check. The question is… why?

Why does a one word note stating “cheese” make me cringe in sympathy with the woman in the header image, who is certain that she is being issued some kind of racial dining charge?

Just look at how devastating some of these Notes can be!

The best answer I can come up with is that Community Notes deliver a two-punch combination.

Firstly, Community Notes have to be agreed upon by multiple users of X who have disagreed with one another previously. That’s a powerful consensus mechanism, ensuring the notes are driving user engagement based on perceived truth value rather than emotion. No single polity can dominate the other in that paradigm. The very moment you try to act out your intent, you can be sorted as a member of a certain polity. Over time, your actions reveal your honest position. What this means is that when a Community Note is slapped on a post, it doesn’t feel like one single person is calling you out. It doesn’t even feel like a group with an agenda is calling you out. It feels like an entire diverse community has spontaneously come together to roll its eyes at you.

Secondly, Community Notes are easy to find. They’re not added as a reply or indexed on some separate page that requires a user to navigate to find the fact-check. The Community Note is stuck right there, on the corrected content for everyone to see. This means that not only can everyone see the correction, everyone knows that everyone can see the correction.

A single user delivering the same exact correction in a reply could never have that sort of impact. Even though every Community Note is itself written by a single user, the process by which it is affixed to a piece of content transforms it into something with greater authority. The placement of it gives the sense that is official.

The next most appropriate question is: why can’t a similar process work everywhere?

The formula that makes Community Notes successful is only two parts. Provide good adjudication to remove sensationalism and bias. Then push the correction to an easy to find location. Scaled appropriately this could change the world!

Imagine two newspapers. One is your standard newspaper delivered to you everyday by your local paperboy as intended by the newspaper editors. The second newspaper went through an additional editorial process. By the time it got to you, that newspaper was marked up by thousands of people that you specifically trust to give you good information. Which of those two newspapers is the most useful?

We’re about to live in a world where no audio, video, or text can be trusted as real, and yet all of it will feel real. Human sense-making is going to have to be scaled to keep pace and force the world into coherent.

At the Trust Assembly we want you to be the maker of your own digital destiny. We want to give you a weapon powerful enough that even the richest institutions on Earth couldn’t ever lie to you and get away with it.

So what do you say, Community Notes for everything?