The phenomenon of the storm street shark may now have come to an end. The platform X, which was once known as Twitter, modified its community-based fact-checking Community Notes feature to allow users to directly tag videos and have those notes appear on any corresponding videos. The platform last week offered the capability to see the amount of matching photos that apply to each fact-check. The same tagging was recently extended to photographs containing Community Notes. Every time a flagged video is posted or reshared from now on, approved Community Notes will appear automatically.
A Community Notes power user subset known as “Top Writers” (if you have to ask what that is, you’re probably not in the club) can now offer additional context to possibly deceptive video footage, according to a post on the tool’s X account. According to the platform, this is a “highly-scalable way” to provide more information for AI-generated films and deceptive video edits.
The success of X’s attempts to crowdsource moderation hasn’t been as great as its current owner frequently claims. Community Notes has been labeled “lackluster” by critics who include MediaWise director Alex Mahadevan for its efforts to prevent false information. Others have noted that user-submitted fact-checks frequently exaggerate falsehoods or fuel the flames, as was the case when a Community Note on a post incorrectly stated that Logan Paul’s fiancée appeared in a porn video and provided a link to the genuine porno clip. As the Poynter Institute noted, since Community Notes must be approved by users from both political parties, inaccurate material on sensitive political issues frequently spreads unchallenged.
You now have the choice to write a remark to just the posted video or the complete post if you are a qualified Community Notes contributor and come across a deceptive video on your timeline. The decisions made by other Community Notes users will determine what happens next. Community Notes are evaluated for correctness by other users in the volunteer moderation program after submission. In accordance with X’s rules, a Community Note will appear directly on the post once enough users have rated it as useful. However, a Community Note will be removed if enough users believe it to be useless. A Community Note’s status is locked after two weeks.
After firing staff members in charge of platform moderation and content quality last year, the Musk-owned platform widely introduced the Community Notes feature (previously known as Birdwatch) and has since expanded it to more nations outside of the US, recently claiming it will graduate to “global visibility” soon.
