X Is Testing a Way To Take Community Notes to the Next Level

Beginning Thursday, X will start testing a feature that labels posts that have been liked by users with differing viewpoints.

Intended to highlight content that has consensus opinions, the tool is rolling out as a pilot to a group of a few thousand testers, all of whom are contributors to Community Notes, X’s crowdsourced approach to fact-checking. 

“The reality, which we see in our data, is there’s quite a lot of agreement among people, and often it’s sort of silent,” Keith Coleman, X’s vp of product and head of Community Notes, told ADWEEK. “When you talk to people and you see what resonates with them, there’s actually commonality, and we see that in Community Notes. That’s why the product works. We are now taking the same approach and finding posts that are liked by people who normally disagree.”

The new feature will display a callout box showing when a post has been widely liked by users with differing opinions—based on historical data about their Community Notes contributions. The callout could appear on both high- or low-visibility posts, including branded content and ads. 

Users included in the pilot will now occasionally see these callout boxes, and can add their input and rate others’ feedback on posts. 

Coleman shared an example: a post from Delta announced that Shake Shack meals will be available on some U.S. flights. That post had a callout touting how multiple people “with different perspectives” like the post.

The user can then click into that callout box and signal whether they agree or disagree with the rating.

The information provided by early testers will eventually be used to build an open-source algorithm that shows when a post is liked by users who hold different perspectives. 

The company has already open-sourced its Community Notes algorithm. Meta adopted the technology in March as the basis for its own new Community Notes program, overhauling its more traditional approach to fact-checking and content moderation. 

X has big ambitions for the new pilot, hoping to “expand to a much larger feature” in the near future, according to Coleman. 

“It may be easy for people to see something like this as a small pilot or small experiment, but what’s really exciting about it is the implication for social media and the way conversation happens in the world and across the internet,” he said.

In 2021, X—then called Twitter—launched an early version of Community Notes dubbed Birdwatch. It has since evolved significantly. Notes can show up minutes, rather than hours, after they’re submitted, and X has rolled out ‘media matching’ to ensure that a given Community Note appears across all posts featuring the same image or video.