Can Community Notes Replace Professional Fact-Checkers?
Two commonly-employed strategies to combat the rise of misinformation on
social media are (i) fact-checking by professional organisations and (ii)
community moderation by platform users. Policy changes by Twitter/X and, more
recently, Meta, signal a shift away from partnerships with fact-checking
organisations and towards an increased reliance on crowdsourced community
notes. However, the extent and nature of dependencies between fact-checking and
helpful community notes remain unclear. To address these questions, we use
language models to annotate a large corpus of Twitter/X community notes with
attributes such as topic, cited sources, and whether they refute claims tied to
broader misinformation narratives. Our analysis reveals that community notes
cite fact-checking sources up to five times more than previously reported.
Fact-checking is especially crucial for notes on posts linked to broader
narratives, which are twice as likely to reference fact-checking sources
compared to other sources. In conclusion, our results show that successful
community moderation heavily relies on professional fact-checking.
67b86819d00e69f10c1f31b9
Nadav Borenstein
claimed_verified
2025-02-25T09:40:52.278Z
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/avatars/9b18f368e5f80cfc935b2e339d42a85f.svg
Nadav Borenstein
user
Nadav
67b86819d00e69f10c1f31ba
Greta Warren
claimed_verified
2025-02-21T14:42:45.791Z
6698cffdb2ebada9f4a7e7d7
/avatars/e66d946c14595d3b008185f2be8d2f57.svg
Greta Warren
user
gretawarren
67b86819d00e69f10c1f31bb
Desmond Elliott
admin_assigned
2025-02-25T16:35:15.142Z
6285f66a7cc3b7bc1b8e7b8e
/avatars/984ae22db7cc885591bc0b5bceffdfbd.svg
Desmond Elliott
user
elliottd
67b86819d00e69f10c1f31bc
Isabelle Augenstein
admin_assigned
2025-02-25T16:35:20.535Z
608918b7df398c3b285ce960
https://cdn-avatars.huggingface.co/v1/production/uploads/1621507769190-608918b7df398c3b285ce960.jpeg
Isabelle Augenstein
user
IAugenstein
Can Community Notes Replace Professional Fact-Checkers?
Two commonly-employed strategies to combat the rise of misinformation on
social media are (i) fact-checking by professional organisations and (ii)
community moderation by platform users. Policy changes by Twitter/X and, more
recently, Meta, signal a shift away from partnerships with fact-checking
organisations and towards an increased reliance on crowdsourced community
notes. However, the extent and nature of dependencies between fact-checking and
helpful community notes remain unclear. To address these questions, we use
language models to annotate a large corpus of Twitter/X community notes with
attributes such as topic, cited sources, and whether they refute claims tied to
broader misinformation narratives. Our analysis reveals that community notes
cite fact-checking sources up to five times more than previously reported.
Fact-checking is especially crucial for notes on posts linked to broader
narratives, which are twice as likely to reference fact-checking sources
compared to other sources. In conclusion, our results show that successful
community moderation heavily relies on professional fact-checking.
Analysis of Twitter/X community notes indicates heavy reliance on fact-checking sources, especially for posts linked to broader misinformation narratives.
fact-checking community moderation language models corpus community notes cited sources misinformation narratives