Saturday, November 9, 2024
Whether you hate them or love them, support them or find them funny, community notes on X are insanely helpful for providing accurate information for posts that may be misleading or contain incorrect facts. That’s when I stumbled upon joining the community notes team. After reviewing a bunch of posts that possibly needed extra context, I’ve realised X has a serious problem, one that isn’t that fixable and the exact reason why notes exist in the first place.
Methods of miss-leading
Unfortunately, many old, genuine accounts post information related to contemporary topics, which almost 100% consists of incorrect information. The topics range from politics to technology, to health knowledge, to controversies and speculations. Unfortunately, politics is the worst.
Believe it or not, it’s more than just accidentally posting information that isn’t correct. As users request community notes, a feed of posts for ‘suggested notes’ is added, and it is recommended for all community note individuals to review and rate either helpful, somewhat helpful or unhelpful. In the recent events of the 2024 US election, numerous genuine tweets from users posting shocking information as a result of the outcome have been widespread notes requested by users on the platform. Unfortunately, there are deeper issues rooted in these posts.
Purposeful fear-mongering
Multiple posts, all under genuine accounts, have posted very similar, borderline copypasta posts about information regarding the outcome of the election. Know that this is not a political post. I’m from Australia, and I could not care less, but it is more of a concern that an increasing amount of users are purposely providing information that is false to push fear into others who innocently view their content.