Community Notes, and the future of journalism

An exploration into making news more communal, and interactive

I have been using Community Notes on Twitter/X for ~8 months, and I love it. I don’t use that word lightly — in a world of major platforms blatantly ripping each other off, Community Notes has emerged as a truly innovative feature. Of the more recent developments in social media, I find it the most valuable, interesting, and inspiring.

Disclaimer: This is not an essay about Twitter/X. Nor is it an essay about Elon’s radical restructuring of the platform’s staff, content policies or strategy. I will point out, though, that amid these contentious changes, the Community Notes feature seems to be universally beloved by the X user base (a group that is often biased towards outrage).

Rather this is an essay about the implications of collaborative fact checking, and how consuming news can become more of an interactive, communal experience — walk with me.

So, why does Community Notes work?

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Community Notes is a feature on X that allows users to add contextual information to tweets (typically tweets with misinformation or ones that omit key details). It essentially is collaborative fact-checking. Here’s an example:

Courtesy of X’s documentation on community notes

It works remarkably well in correcting misinformation in an unbiased way. I recognize that individuals aren’t neutral, but groups of people approximate that ideal and the algorithm leverages that.

Anyone can become a contributor as long as they verify their identity and have been an X user for >= 6 months. As I said at the top, I joined back in July, and it’s been transformative for how I consume tweets. It’s made me a more intentional reader, and a more engaged one — I want to unpack why I think this is.

1. Firstly, Community Notes turns readers into active participants. It’s well documented that the vast majority of online users are lurkers (ie. they don’t contribute or post, but passively observe). I myself used to post quite often but started to drop off once my social circle left the platform. In any case, there’s a mental block that most of us lurkers cannot overcome in order to post (namely, getting past the anxiety of “Why would anyone care?”). By virtue of being anonymous, Community Notes has a lower barrier to entry than explicitly tweeting. And because its main purpose is to target misinformation, no one will be left wondering why anyone would care.
2. Secondly, active participation makes me an empowered stakeholder. I now feel a sense of ownership, and even responsibility, for the discourse ecosystem on Twitter, however slight. And I have some agency to shape the discourse and ensure that good-faith discussion is prioritized.
3. Thirdly, it (implicitly) teaches media literacy and critical thinking. After contributing to Community Notes, I’ve become better at discerning reliable information from misinformation on Twitter. I believe the recommendation algorithm has gotten better too, although there’s no way to quantify that. Whether someone is enrolled in Community Notes or not, its very presence encourages a more intentional reading approach. Users are aware that they need to critically evaluate the information in their feed, especially if it has a note appended to it.

The intention of Community Notes is not always to correct the offending tweet, but to add contextual information. I like to think of them as annotations — and they are an effective reminder that multiple perspectives exist.

And why should newsrooms care?

Yes, newsrooms have in-house fact-checking resources. There’s no immediate need to use the public for fact-checking in this way. They also would never deal with misinformation at the same scale that a platform like Twitter would, because journalists are generally committed to the truth.

I actually think for a private newspaper, we shouldn’t allow random people on the internet to challenge journalists’ authority in an unthoughtful way (see: my rant about media bias charts). But, I have to acknowledge that newsrooms have an image problem, and I believe that letting readers into the process may help to win back their trust.

As I see it, there’s two ways to “let readers in”:

1. Transparency: I have faith in journalists because at one point, I worked in a newsroom. I’m intimately familiar with the process — this is not a new idea, and I’m not going to expand on it much in this essay.
2. Turning readers into active participants, similar to Community Notes. Newsrooms do a little bit of this in allowing readers to leave comments on some articles, but there’s room for further experimentation.

Community Notes typically target biased language that journalists by training do not engage in. So you may not see the point — but as I’ve hinted at, there’s another benefit.

The truth is that Community Notes are an engagement hack.

Let’s be frank — people don’t read news as much. But they consume it indirectly, via instagram graphics, commentary youtubers, reddit megathreads, discussion boards and of course, tweets.

My personal theory is that we like reading with a “take” — news packaged in this way gives readers the relevant information, but also the manner in which they can naturally weave it into a conversation. I’m guilty of doing this, a lot.

Presenting commentary alongside reporting could be another way to hook readers into actually reading the story. I get why newspapers would not want to bias their reporting in this way — and opinion sections exist for a reason. So why not lean on existing readership to provide commentary?

This may be a foreign concept for anyone who didn’t grow up on social media, but the age of passively consuming content is over — for better or worse, we are all able to create content now, and most of us want to play a role in how information is communicated and shared, even if we don’t directly create it.

Line-by-line comments are not new; both Medium and Wattpad allow them (and probably other products I’m not aware of). Whenever I see a piece on Medium with several inline comments, I get excited — it simulates having a dialog with the author, and is much more dynamic than reading the story in a vacuum.

Screenshots of Medium and Wattpad comments interface.

And although it’s been a long time since I actively read Wattpad, I remember feeling the same about the comments there. Especially as a teenaged girl, I felt some residual shame about reading amateur stories on Wattpad, and the thousands of comments showed me I wasn’t alone in that enjoyment. It was social proof, and it kept me on the platform.

I understand that newsrooms might be reluctant to adopt this model, given that user-generated content (UGC) arguably eroded their authority in the first place. Newsrooms are slow to change policies by design; there are certain trade-offs journalists weigh that the “move fast, break things” crowd will not consider.

But that doesn’t mean they should remain static when every other major source of content evolves by the quarter. I believe there are ways to adapt to the current media ecosystem without compromising on principles.

What are the principles of community notes that could apply to news?

1. Behind-the-scenes & transparency: When reading a news story, it’s difficult to feel the presence of authors, peers, readers — that’s why I mainly consume news on reddit and other forums. It extends the canvas of the story. Meta commentary is powerful, it builds trust between readers, in the institution and process and builds commentary.
2. Interactivity: Hyperlinks and embeds have already been embraced, but we can do more. Longform data visualization stories is one example that has clearly served newsrooms well, but they’re not easily shareable to other platforms
3. Social Proof: Reading news is an isolating experience, especially if the content is demoralizing — a sense of community (with readers, or authors) can help restore hope. This could indirectly address another complaint, in that only editors are the sole arbiters of what’s “newsworthy” — the community of readers can platform certain stories, by discussing and sharing it.

And what are some guardrails to keep in mind?

1. Should not sacrifice original reporting, quality or credibility.
2. Should not throw the journalist under the bus
3. Should not assume infallibility, either of journalists or readership

Adhering to these principles can build out a whole ecosystem of tools.

Below are some mocks of example experiences that newsrooms could implement.

Mocks of Line-by-Line comments (left) and inline corrections (right) in a news article

Mocks of Readership Networks (left) and Real-Time Metrics (right) appearing alongside a news article

And these are just surface-level ideas — newsrooms could experiment with machine learning models to generate live summaries, or borrow from the Wikipedia model to host community “sparknotes”.

In conclusion…

I want to acknowledge that there’s real risk to the ideas I’m proposing. I know that moderating comments is a thankless, stressful job; I know that comments could become another avenue for nameless users to funnel their rage into; I know that online users behave differently when they feel “perceived,” and that there’s appetite to hide public-facing metrics; and I know that journalists already deal with an unreasonable amount of hate and toxicity.

But, my trade is data science and I believe in the spirit of experimentation. I also believe in the wisdom of crowds. Wikipedia is a modern miracle — there are so many reasons it shouldn’t work, and yet. Tech companies have pioneered using UGC to engage and bait free audiences in order to strengthen network effects; news has barely survived this upheaval of the digital ecosystem, and the way to regain ground may lie in the tactics that once posed an existential risk.