'Stuck in limbo': Over 90% of X's Community Notes unpublished, study says

Japan Today

2 days ago

By Anuj CHOPRA
More than 90 percent of X's Community Notes -- a crowd-sourced verification system popularized by Elon Musk's platform -- are never published, a study said, highlighting major limits in its effectiveness as a debunking tool.
The study by the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA), which analyzed the entire public dataset of 1.76 million notes published by X between January 2021 and March 2025, comes as the platform's CEO Linda Yaccarino resigned after two years at the helm.
The community-driven moderation model -- now embraced by major tech platforms including Facebook-owner Meta and TikTok -- allows volunteers to contribute notes that add context or corrections to posts.
Other users then rate the proposed notes as "helpful" or "not helpful." If the notes get "helpful" ratings from enough users with diverse perspectives, they are published on X, appearing right below the challenged posts.
"The vast majority of submitted notes -- more than 90 percent -- never reach the public," DDIA's study said. "For a program marketed as fast, scalable, and transparent, these figures should raise serious concerns."
Among English notes, the publication rate dropped from 9.5 percent in 2023 to just 4.9 percent in early 2025, the study said.
Spanish-language notes, however, showed some growth, with the publication rate rising from 3.6 percent to 7.1 percent over the same period, it added.
A vast number of notes remain unpublished due to lack of consensus among users during rating.
Thousands of notes also go unrated, possibly never seen and never assessed, according to the report.
"As the volume of notes submitted grows, the system's internal visibility bottleneck becomes more apparent –- especially in English," the study said. "Despite a rising number of contributors submitting notes, many notes remain stuck in limbo, unseen and unevaluated by fellow contributors, a crucial step for notes to be published."
In a separate finding, DDIA's researchers identified not a human but a bot-like account -- dedicated to flagging crypto scams –- as the most prolific contributor to the program in English, submitting more than 43,000 notes between 2021 and March 2025.
However, only 3.1 percent of those notes went live, suggesting most went unseen or failed to gain consensus, the report said.
The study also noted that the time it takes for a note to go live had improved over the years, dropping from an average of more than 100 days in 2022 to 14 days in 2025.
"Even this faster timeline is far too slow for the reality of viral misinformation, timely toxic content, or simply errors about real-time events, which spread within hours, not weeks," DDIA's report said.
The findings are significant as tech platforms increasingly view the community-driven model as an alternative to professional fact-checking, which conservative advocates in countries such as the United States have long accused of a liberal bias.
Studies have shown Community Notes can work to dispel some falsehoods such as vaccine misinformation, but researchers have long cautioned that it works best for topics where there is broad consensus.
Some researchers have also cautioned that Community Notes users can be motivated by partisan motives and tend to target their political opponents.
X introduced Community Notes during the tenure of Yaccarino, who said on Wednesday that she had decided to step down after leading the company through a major transformation.
No reason was given for her exit, but the resignation came as Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok triggered an online firestorm over its anti-Semitic comments that praised Adolf Hitler and insulted Islam in separate posts on X.
© 2025 AFP