Can Community Notes Replace Professional Fact-Checkers?
Nadav Borenstein, Greta Warren, Desmond Elliott, Isabelle Augenstein
2025-02-25
Summary
This paper talks about whether community-written notes on social media can replace professional fact-checkers in fighting misinformation online
What's the problem?
Social media platforms are moving away from using professional fact-checkers and relying more on user-written community notes to combat false information. However, it's not clear how much these community notes actually depend on professional fact-checking to be effective
What's the solution?
The researchers used AI to analyze a large number of community notes on Twitter/X, looking at things like what topics they covered, what sources they cited, and whether they addressed wider misinformation trends. They found that community notes use fact-checking sources much more often than previously thought, especially when dealing with posts related to bigger misinformation narratives
Why it matters?
This matters because it shows that community notes, which platforms like Twitter/X and Meta are increasingly relying on, actually depend heavily on professional fact-checking to be successful. This suggests that completely replacing professional fact-checkers with community notes might not work as well as these companies hope, and could potentially make it harder to fight misinformation effectively on social media
Abstract
Two commonly-employed strategies to combat the rise of misinformation on social media are (i) fact-checking by professional organisations and (ii) community moderation by platform users. Policy changes by Twitter/X and, more recently, Meta, signal a shift away from partnerships with fact-checking organisations and towards an increased reliance on crowdsourced community notes. However, the extent and nature of dependencies between fact-checking and helpful community notes remain unclear. To address these questions, we use language models to annotate a large corpus of Twitter/X community notes with attributes such as topic, cited sources, and whether they refute claims tied to broader misinformation narratives. Our analysis reveals that community notes cite fact-checking sources up to five times more than previously reported. Fact-checking is especially crucial for notes on posts linked to broader narratives, which are twice as likely to reference fact-checking sources compared to other sources. In conclusion, our results show that successful community moderation heavily relies on professional <PRE_TAG>fact-checking</POST_TAG>.