Yeah, that's not exactly a ringing endorsement of X's Community Notes crowd-sourced moderation approach.

A day after announcing a major update to the back end architecture of Community Notes, which will mean that approved Notes will show up faster than ever, The Washington Post has published a new report that reveals that Community Notes are pretty much failing to curb misinformation on the app.

It's based on the Post's own research and a new report from The Center for Countering Digital Hate, which suggests that Community Notes' requirement of securing agreement from reviewers of opposing political viewpoints is hampering the project.

The current process for Community Notes is this:

X user taps the "Request Community Note" option from the three dots menu on a post
The post is marked to the Community Notes contributing group for checking
Approved Notes contributor checks the post for accuracy and suitable info and submits a suggested Note where appropriate
The proposed Note is then checked on in turn (by a different political persuasion of the Notes contributor), before it finally appears on the post, or not depending upon process
It's that final step, where CCDH claims to have the problem of the Notes bottleneck, as most never achieve cross-political consensus. Therefore, most never make it to be viewed in the app.

As quoted by The CCDH:

"We found that 209 of 283 misleading posts in our sample [on the US election] have accurate Community Notes that are not available to all X users, or 74%. We considered notes "accurate" when they reflect independent fact-checks, cite credible sources and explain why their associated post is misleading."

Thus, in 74% of instances where a Note was submitted, and CCDH considered it a correct request to amend, the Note never appeared for the app users.

Further, according to CCDH, posts that contained election falsehoods about the US were viewed within its corpus more than 2.9 billion times within the app.

So, what is holding up these Notes from meeting their needed threshold?
Of the many false claims being amplified across X and not being Community Noted, the majority relate to the 2020 election being "stolen," which many Republican voters maintain as being true, although various investigations found no such evidence. Republican candidate Donald Trump also continues to support this claim, so it's no surprise that the Republican Community Notes contributors disagree about this being queried.

Claims of voter importation rank second, and the second concern has been about voting systems safety, as owned by X owner Elon Musk, who has been one of the biggest amplifiers for this claim.

It would appear from the list of topics that these are pretty obviously not going to be Community Noted in the app, even with factual sources to refute them. On some topics, political opponents are never going to agree, which also means X is helping to amplify those false claims in the app.
But again, despite evidence to the contrary, many will insist that these things are true, and it's all part of some greater cover-up. Really, that's why Community Notes holds such appeal for Musk because his view is that some things reported as truth by the media aren't correct, and people should decide what's accurate.

But that clearly shows a weakness in the Community Notes system. Contributors may refute such claims with actual evidence, but those on the other side of the political aisle can just shoot them down because they don't agree, and no note is shown as a result.

In addition to CCDH's findings, WaPo's own analysis discovered that only 79,000 of the more than 900,000 Community Notes written in 2024 have been shown publicly, less than 9%, and the success rate of a Note being displayed is declining over time.

Therefore, even though more people are signing up to the program, and more Notes are being created, fewer, on balance, are actually being displayed to users.

What really matters is that X flipped the Community Notes approval system over from being logical to one that's ideological, a system in which the contributor consensus becomes more important than the actual facts. Now, in most cases that will never be reached because of this, the majority of the Notes are hidden.

Again, though, that would count as a victory for Musk, because, in that scenario, the people get to decide what's fact and what is not--not "the mainstream media," which Musk likes to paint as the embodiment of evil on the information plain.

The very best fact-checkers are, by Musks' account, the people, but when those people opt out of actual evidence it would appear to be not so hot an idea.