Most X Community Notes related to political content are not displayed on the platform

Las X Community Notes (formerly Twitter) fail to counter false and misleading claims about political events, such as the upcoming US presidential election, because the vast majority of these comments are not displayed on the platform.

It is one of the conclusions reached by the Center to Counter Digital Hate (CCDH), which has carried out research in which it used 283 sample publications to find out how the platform behaves against ‘fake news’.

CCDH has recalled that, after purchasing Twitter and changing its name to X, its owner, Elon Musk, eliminated the platform’s content moderation systems to implement one in which the users themselves would be in charge of making it “the best source really on the internet.

Then, it implemented Community Notes, comments provided by collaborators of the social network that appear under certain publications to clarify false, inaccurate or decontextualized information related to videos or images.

CCDH researchers have pointed out in a recent analysis that this system “is failing” and that the majority of these contributions never reach users, which allows the spread of misinformation in an uncontrolled manner.

This means that “X cannot rely on Community Notes” to keep the platform “safe”, something that this same body already suggested in a previous analysis, which revealed that misleading publications rarely or never had Community Notes available. community attached to controversial topics.

For CCDH, the problem lies in the way in which community notes are processed, which require consensus, which is not always achieved when dealing with certain topics. “As a result, the community notes fail precisely where they are needed most,” have maintained.

To produce this other report, analysts downloaded an initial set of more than 1 million community notes publicly available on the social network. Then, they filtered them to choose only those written between January 1 and August 25, 2024.

Next, another screen was done to choose only those that contained keywords associated with presidential elections or voting, with more than 150 ratings, giving preference to those that had the indicative ‘Útil’, which means that the note is publicly visible.

The researchers evaluated which of the 3,192 publications obtained after this were “relevant” for the analysistaking into account that they had to be written in English and could contain misleading statements about the US elections or the candidates, as they have pointed out in their document.

As a result, they took a sample of 283 posts that have notes from the precise community. Of them, 209 were not shown to X usersthat is, 74 percent of these communications do not fulfill their initial function, that is, informing community members.

Likewise, the ‘fake’ publications that remained active during the study and that did not show the Community Notes added to all users managed to accumulate 2.2 billion views on the platform.

These posts included statements such as “the goal of the Democratic Party is to import voters,” “Trump is no longer eligible to run for President and “You must abandon the race immediately.” or “42 of the 50 states in the United States no longer require a photo ID to vote.”

On the other hand, experts warned that posts without community notes and that promote false narratives about American politics obtained billions of views and that those that did contain them received 13 times more views than the contextual information itself. This is a result of “delays in the writing and publication of these community notes,” according to analysts.

INQUIRIES BY THE WASHINGTON POST

On the occasion of the upcoming presidential elections in the United States, The Washington Post has carried out an analysis parallel to that of the CCDH and has warned that only 7.4 percent of the community notes proposed in 2024 and related to the elections were ever shown, a proportion that fell further in Octoberto only 5.7 percent.

Likewise, this newspaper has pointed out that publications by Republican politicians are four times more likely than those by Democrats to obtain approval of a proposed community note.

This, despite the fact that more explanatory notes were proposed on publications from the Democratic side in general and due to “the large number of notes on accounts associated with the current US president, Joe Biden, and the vice president and candidate, Kamala Harris.

This medium has referred to another analysis published in September in which it points to @EndWokeness, an X account with 3.1 million followers that began to spread Donald Trump’s hoax about the cats and dogs that immigrants eat. Haitians.

This post remained unchecked for four days until a Community Notes contributor flagged it as false and cited five sources to support his correction. Because the note failed to gather the necessary consensus to be labeled ‘fake news’, it remains on said X profile and currently has almost five million views.

The Washington Post has also said that one of the users of the social network to whom the Notes are most frequently addressed of the proposed community is its owner. MuskIn fact, in July he shared a video in which he manipulated Kamala Harris’ voice and received at least 25 community notes indicating that the content was not real. None of them appear, so even today this video appears without its necessary contextual information.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Based on their conclusions, the analysts have pointed out a series of recommendations aimed to improve transparencyinsisting that meta must prioritize comprehensive trust and safety measures as well as “urgently” reconsider its current moderation strategies.

It also believes it must expand and improve the tools used to combat disinformation, with the aim of strengthening accuracy and fairness, in addition to making its application programming interface (API) be “widely accessible.”

Likewise, he has insisted that “self-regulation is clearly not enough” and that both regulators and legislators must address X’s failure to stop the spread of misinformation. Finally, he noted that advertisers should evaluate their participation in financing fraudulent electoral claims.

LIGHTNING NOTES

The publication of these conclusions coincides with the announcement of the so-called Lightning Notes, designed to speed up the process of analysis and publication of these comments, which now appear less than 20 minutes later that the reported content has been uploaded to the social network.

This format can be applied to text publications as well as images and videos and has been designed thinking that “speed is important” when contrasting the facts that may involve the distribution of ‘fake news’.