X is seeking to expand the turnaround time of Community Notes, with a new program that will display the notes on the posts being queried within the app faster than ever.

Today, X announced a new project known as "Lightning Notes," which, in testing, has seen some notes added to posts within less than 15 minutes of the note being written.

As described by X:

"People want fast notes, so we re-architected the system to score notes faster. Since rolling this out, we've seen notes go live in as little as 14m33s after being written, and 18m20s after the post itself was written."

For comparison, up until now, Community Notes have typically taken over an hour or more to appear on a post after it's flagged to the Community Notes contributor group.

This is how it works:

X user clicks on the "Request Community Note" option from the three dots menu on a post
The contributor group for Community Notes is alerted to the post to be reviewed
An approved contributor to Notes reviews the post, checking for accuracy and relevant info and submits a proposed Note where valid
The proposed Note is then passed for review to another Notes contributor who might have a varying political perspective, and it can then be displayed on the post, or not as may be the case with the process.
It will take time but now X believes that under certain conditions, it might be possible to get it down into minutes.

That would be a big step forward for the process, though I wouldn't know whether it'd be feasible to deploy at scale "Lightning Notes" for all, or even most of the posts flagged in the system at any given time.

This would mean that, logically, with 800,000 contributors of Community Notes, managing however many Notes per day based on the 500 million or so posts submitted to the app, that is a lot of manual work being put in to get the Notes up as fast as possible. And actually, displaying all of those Notes to users within minutes isn't possible, but X says that now, any Community Note that's displayed within less than an hour of the post being published will show a lightning bolt icon to reflect this effort.

Which is important, because research has shown that the faster a Community Note goes up, the more it reduces the impact of misinformation.

But, on the other hand, really, an hour's a long enough cycle for a post to have a good impact. Plus, with the most followed user of the app also amplifying false claims to hundreds of millions of users, even half an hour between publishing and a note being added will be too long in many cases.

This has always been the weakness of Community Notes: the process simply takes too long to actually be effective as a way of preventing misinformation. It's a good system, allowing users to participate in addressing false reports, and a helpful addition to an established moderation process. But X is relying too heavily on Community Notes to be its primary moderation tool, and it's not designed to be relied upon at that level.

However, the Community Notes team has done a lot to help improve the system that now also includes retrospective alerts on posts you've engaged with that have since been given a Community Note added.

Faster Notes is another important improvement, but other factors are at play as well as inherent limitations in the process that might undo the true value of this element.