Twitter Community Notes to Require Contributors to Provide Sources
With Twitter's blue checkmark no longer conveying as much authority as it used to, the service's Community Notes feature is perhaps the next best way to know if what you're reading in a tweet is legit. But where are these crowd-sourced posters getting their data?
To address this problem, Twitter (now known as X) will require external links as sources on Community Notes, similar to how it works on Wikipedia.
The change comes days after X received pressure from the EU's Thierry Breton to curb what Breton referred to as "risks to public security and civic discourse stemming from disinformation." Initially, Elon Musk defended X, saying that its fact-checking mechanisms were working as expected. X CEO Linda Yaccarino chimed in to say that the company removes rule-breaking content and responds to law enforcement requests worldwide.
A report from Wired this week, however, showed that the Community Notes feature is fairly easy to manipulate. A Community Notes contributor essentially told the publication that they, along with roughly 25 other people in their group, upvote and downvote Notes to manipulate visibility.
“We have a group so we can coordinate who writes what Community Notes, and if you write one, you can coordinate so you get one voted as helpful, and there's no validation on any of that,” the contributor told Wired.
With the new requirement to link sources, X is hoping to make it more difficult to spread disinformation. There don't appear to be any real guidelines as to what constitutes a source. However, Musk weighed in to say: "We will have to watch this one. Links to actual source data, not some bs press article, are what matter."
Other social media networks have also taken steps to stop the spread of
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