index.md 6.0 KB
title: Introduction
description: Learn everything about Community Notes, X's open-source program to create a better-informed world.
Community Notes: a collaborative way to add helpful context to posts and keep people better informed
Community Notes aims to create a better-informed world, by empowering people on X to collaboratively add helpful notes to posts that might be misleading.
{% inline wrap="false" %} {% atmImage maxWidth="40" width="40" src="./images/people.svg" alt="Vector icon of 3 people together" /%} {% stack %} Contributors write and rate notes
Contributors are people on X, just like you, who sign up to write and rate notes. The more people that participate, the better the program becomes. {% /stack %} {% /inline %}
{% inline wrap="false" %} {% atmImage src="./images/rate.svg" alt="Vector icon of a star, half-filled with color" maxWidth="40" width="40" /%} {% stack %} Only notes rated helpful by people from diverse perspectives appear on posts
Community Notes doesn't work by majority rules. To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, notes require agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings.
Learn more about how Community Notes handles diverse perspectives. {% /stack %} {% /inline %}
{% inline wrap="false" %} {% atmImage maxWidth="40" width="40" src="./images/world.svg" alt="Vector icon of the earth" /%} {% stack %} X doesn’t choose what shows up, the people do
X doesn’t write, rate or moderate notes (unless they break X's Rules.) We believe giving people a voice to make these choices together is a fair and effective way to add information that helps people stay better informed. {% /stack %} {% /inline %}
{% inline wrap="false" %} {% atmImage maxWidth="40" width="40" src="./images/open-source.svg" alt="Vector icon of 3 a network with distributed nodes" /%} {% stack %} Open-source and transparent
It’s important for people to understand how Community Notes works, and to be able to help shape it. The program is built on transparency: all contributions are published daily, and our ranking algorithm can be inspected by anyone. Learn more how it works under the hood. {% /stack %} {% /inline %}
{% box backgroundColor="gray-100" cornerRadius="radius-16" topPadding="space-12" bottomPadding="space-12" leftPadding="space-24" rightPadding="space-24" %} {% inline align="space-between" alignY="center" %} Become a Community Notes contributor {% button buttonTitle="Sign up here" buttonHref="https://x.com/i/flow/join-birdwatch" /%} {% /inline %} {% /box %}
Frequently asked questions
{% accordionSection %} {% accordionItem title="How does a post get a note?" %}
Contributors can suggest a note on any post. Notes are then rated for helpfulness by other contributors. Notes are only shown on posts if they are rated helpful by enough people from different perspectives. See how Community Notes defines and uses differences of perspectives here.
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{% accordionItem title="How does Community Notes prevent abuse?" %}
Community Notes works differently than the rest of the platform. It is not a popularity contest. It aims to find notes that many people from different points of view will find helpful. It takes into account not only how many ratings a note has received, but also whether people who rated it helpful seem to come from different perspectives. Because notes need to genuinely be found helpful by people who tend to disagree, the program is more likely to identify notes that many people find helpful. Read the full details of how this works.
Notes are also subject to X's Rules and can be reported.
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{% accordionItem title="Can regular people be trusted to do this?" %}
We believe regular people can valuably contribute to identifying and adding helpful context to potentially misleading information. Many of the internet’s existing collaborative sites thrive with the help of non-expert contributions — Wikipedia, for example — and, while it’s not a cure-all, research has shown the potential of incorporating crowdsourced based approaches as part of a broader toolkit to address misleading information on the internet, for example:
- Allen, Arechar, Pennycook, and Rand 2021
- Resnick, Alfayez, Im, and Gilbert 2021
- Bhuiyan, Zhang, Sehat, and Mitra 2020
- Kim and Walker 2020
In our pilot test of Community Notes, we evaluated notes would be shown on posts, and have found:
- The majority of people surveyed on X found notes helpful.
- People in surveys were 20-40% less likely to agree with the substance of a potentially misleading post after reading the note about it, compared to those who saw a post without a note.
- Most notes have been rated highly on accuracy by professional reviewers; it has been rare to find a note that reviewers agree is inaccurate.
The people on X span a wide gamut of backgrounds and experiences, and we believe that, working together, they can help create a better-informed world.
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{% accordionItem title="I have a note on my post. What can I do?" %}
As a post author, if you disagree that a note provides important context about your post, you can request additional review.
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Explore other Frequently Asked Questions