X is trying to speed up a crowdsourced fact-checking system with community records. In updatethe company says it has “re-architected” its feature-enhancing rating system so that user-generated comments can appear on its platform less than 20 minutes after a post is published.
Introduced in 2022, Community Notes relies on other X users to fact-check or add missing context to posts on the platform. Depositors required their sources and other users evaluate the “usefulness” of the record. There are also creators for “publicly flagged” posts to discourage attempts to monetize disinformation. Now this whole process should be able to move much faster.
According to X, these new “lightning records” “can be live 14 m33 seconds after being written, and 18 m20 seconds after the record itself is written.” The change could help address a longstanding criticism of the crowdsourced fact-checking system: that it moves too slowly compared to the speed of viral misinformation on the platform. For example, by last year Bloomberg It found that it can take hours for a community note to appear in a viral tweet, and that often only a fraction of users see the fact-check compared to the original post.
A new faster system could change that, although it’s unclear how often the faster “lightning” version of the process will work. Not all posts are misinformation, misrepresented facts or AI generated imagery If they are, they are flagged for immediate review. X says the app has more than 800,000 contributors globally, but some posts will still take a long time to go through the Community Notes process.
