Poll-time fact-check tool 'Community Notes': Crowdsourced X feature makes India debut

Elon Musk, who owns X, has on several occasions praised the feature, saying it ensures factually correct information reaches the user

Mathures Paul, TT,  Calcutta, 05.04.24:  X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is rolling out its crowdsourced fact-checking tool Community Notes in India, weeks before the Lok Sabha elections.

Elon Musk, who owns X, has on several occasions praised the feature, saying it ensures factually correct information reaches the user. It’s coming at a time when his stance on the US “mail-in” voting process is being criticised.

The first set of contributors from India will start posting notes immediately, X said. “We’ll monitor quality to ensure that notes are found helpful by people from different points of view,” the company said in a post.

Contributors, chosen by X, are supposed to offer context to popular posts to debunk myths or offer broader insights. The submissions then get rated by users for helpfulness and accuracy. Community Notes so far has contributors in 69 countries.

Since Musk took control of the platform (he completed the acquisition in October 2022), he dismantled old system for flagging false content. In September 2023, he posted on X: “Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.” Last year, the company once again allowed political ads on the platform.

X has had its share of run-ins with the Indian government for ordering the platform to withhold certain posts and accounts. In February, X’s Global Government Affairs handle posted: “In compliance with the orders, we will withhold these accounts and posts in India alone; however, we disagree with these actions and maintain that freedom of expression should extend to these posts.”

Last year, Musk told BBC that the “rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict and we can’t go beyond the laws of the country”.

Community Notes was initially launched (as Birdwatch) in January 2021 when Jack Dorsey was the CEO of Twitter. The idea was to allow users to drop notes on posts that may have misleading information and users were given the option to mark them “helpful” or “not helpful”.

Depending on the feedback, the platform chose the best notes and added them below a post. In December 2022, X announced that the feature would be visible to users worldwide. Till January, Community Notes had more than 375,000 contributors globally.