‘Welcome to the party,’ says X CEO to Zuckerberg despite Community Notes’ failures

MANILA, Philippines – X CEO Linda Yaccarino on Wednesday, January 8, had a ready comment for Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement to end fact checkers on Meta platforms in favor of a community-based correction method called Community Notes, a version of which originated from X.

The CEO had an on-stage interview with journalist Catherine Herridge, formerly of CBS News, at CES 2025.

Yaccarino said: “How cool is that? I think it’s really exciting that when you think about Community Notes being good for the world, think about it as this global collective consciousness keeping each other accountable at global scale in real time.”

She added: “And it couldn’t be more validating than to see that Mark and Meta realized that, right? And when you think about Community Notes, Mark and Meta realized that it’s the most effective, fastest fact-checking without bias…. Also, it inspires great behavior. Human behavior is inspired because when a post is [given a Community Note, it’s] dramatically shared less. So that’s the power of Community Notes. And we say, Mark, Meta, welcome to the party.”

Independent research provides a less rosy picture than the one Yaccarino paints. 

One recent report comes from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) in November 2024, which found that posts that supposedly have “accurate Community Notes” were not being shown to a great majority of users. 

The nonprofit found that 209 out of the 283 misleading posts that have been given an accurate Community Note were “not being shown to all X users” leading to 2.2 billion views without the correct note. 

CCDH CEO Imran Amhed explained that while theoretically, “decentralized fact-checking” could have merits, the reality is that such a system doesn’t fit how democracy operates.

Ahmed said, “X’s innovation in community-based decentralized fact-checking was — we generously assume — intended to be a democratic and transparent process where communities hash out debates and agree on mutually established facts.”

“Of course, social media, like our democracies, does not operate this way. Our social media feeds have no neutral ‘town square’ for rational debate. In reality, it is messy, complicated, and opaque rules and systems make it impossible for all voices to be heard. Without checks and balances, proper oversight, and well-resourced trust and safety teams in place, X cannot rely on Community Notes to keep X safe,” he added.

More findings on Community Notes

An academic study published in November 2024 as well on the journal Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, found that the implementation of Community Notes on X were too slow to keep up with the virality of false posts.

“We find no evidence that the introduction of Community Notes and its roll-out to users in the US and around the world led to a significant reduction in user engagement with misleading tweets. Our findings suggest that the response time of Community Notes may be not fast enough to intervene in the engagement with misinformation during early and highly viral stages of diffusion,” the study said while proposing changes towards the earlier identification of potentially false posts.

The Washington Post also published similar research in an October 2024 article called “Elon Musk says X users fight falsehoods. The falsehoods are winning” (paywall). 

And as early as late 2023, Wired reported on insiders that warned on Community Notes’ ineffectiveness and it being prone to manipulation. The site wrote, it “may be vulnerable to coordinated manipulation by outside groups, and lacks transparency about how notes are approved. Sources also claim that it is filled with in-fighting and disinformation, and there appears to be no real oversight from the company itself.”

Poynter in their September 2024 assessment of the tool reported how the potential of Community Notes as something that is more scalable, and can be something that people trust more. However, recent figures haven’t been able to show that this potential is being reached, with the site citing a report that the Community Notes just aren’t being distributed to readers. 

“A Maldita.es analysis of disinformation surrounding the European Parliamentary elections this year found that X did not take visible action in 70% of cases, and Community Notes only appeared on 15% of the posts that were debunked by independent fact-checkers,” Poynter said. 

One favorable report on Community Notes, however, came in April 2024, via the Journal of the American Medical Association, which found that at least for COVID-19 vaccines, the system worked. The researchers checked 205 Community Notes, and found that 96% of which were accurate, and 87% of which cited high quality sources. 

Yaccarino praised their implementation of Community Notes as a “massive, massive success.” But the current literature and findings on Community Notes — especially on highly partisan topics — as well as the continued spread of falsehoods on X, are showing otherwise.

Yaccarino also said that X has hired former Wall Street Journal editor John Stoll to lead its “news group and partnership team.” – Rappler.com