let's say you're on the website formerly known as Twitter statistically most of
you aren't but let's pretend you're Doom scrolling as usual when suddenly you
spot a post claiming that ancient aliens are living in bunkers beneath the
Pyramids of Giza and they haven't paid rent in nearly 12,000 years but then
right underneath it you spot a little window that says there actually aren't
any bunkers underneath the pyramids alongside a link to a Wikipedia article
on squatter's rights this little note stuck onto the bottom of a post like a
little um actually Barnacle is what EXC
likes to call a community note and it might just be the future of social media
moderation social media platforms are under serious pressure to control the
spread of misinformation by governments by investors by their own users this
puts companies in the awkward position of having to be the Arbiters of what is
and isn't factual reality and what is
and isn't acceptable speech some of those cases are going to be pretty
clearcut the Earth isn't flat and you can't threaten to kill people but
there's also going to be a lot of ambigu that's where Community notes comes in
it's a genius feature that lets X delegate responsibility for factchecking
onto its user base but also allows the users to build their own consensus as a
community in a mostly polite Democratic manner without top- down sensorship
Community notes were first added as a uson feature in January 2021 under the
original name of bird watch everything was better before it was rebranded and
expanded in November 2022 shortly after the site fell under new management the
primary goal of the future is to combat misinformation both intentional and
unintentional by crowdsourcing factchecking through Anonymous
volunteers when normal people encounter a post that lacks context they get to be
mad or misled and move on but users approved as Community notes contributors
have a third option a button that lets them add an asterisk to any misleading
post the user will then be asked to specify why they think the post needs a
note whether it's misleading inaccurate outdated satirical in a way that might
go over many people's heads Etc the contributor will be encouraged to add a
link to a reliable source backing their counter claim then that proposed note
appears on the community notes dashboard of other contributors who vote on
whether or not it's helpful contributors may even decide to write a counter
counter claim on that proposed Community note explaining why it's inaccurate or
irrelevant and encouraging other contributors to vote against it to be
clear and this is actually where it gets interesting this is not a simple
majority system where whichever note gets the most votes wins a note needs to
hit a certain threshold of supporting votes and those votes need to show a
general consensus among contributors who typically disagree with each other this
encourages contributors to stick to the facts and cite reliable sources when
writing a note it also makes it a lot harder for a partisan group to dog pile
on a post and fact check it with their own personal opinion this kind of system
is Prim primarily attractive to two kinds of people people with strong
opinions and nitpickers who like to be right but it's balanced in such a way to
disadvantage the opinionated and place nitpickers in the position of King maker
unfortunately many Rank and file normal people users don't understand how
Community notes Works which can lead to anger and mistrust of the future people
often perceive Community notes as coming from Twitter or attribute them
personally to Elon Musk despite the fact that musk himself is a frequent
recipient of its fact checks others view the voting system as rigged because they
don't trust Twitter as an institution worse as more and more people see and
vote on a note it might appear and disappear as it falls above and below
the threshold to be seen by all users leading to the perception that a
correction has been suspiciously removed by the powers that be likewise it can be
sometimes hard to fact check controversial figures with a passionate
parasocial fan base who are willing to vote down perfectly reasonable
criticisms plus the contrib twit panel isn't all that visually distinct from
the rest of Twitter so some participants will take and post screenshots of sick
dunks they've submitted as Community notes leading to the perception that
this kind of petty squabbling is what's actually getting put on people's posts
it's not but perhaps the biggest concern with Community notes is that they
demonetize any post that they're applied to with the idea being to disincentivize
for-profit disinformation like celebrity death hoaxes or conspiracy Mills the
problem is that demonetization doesn't take into account why the note was
written in the first place whether it was a correction an update or even just
additional context but these are mostly minor issues specific to X's
implementation of community notes the deeper question is whether this is a
principally good concept that we should try to implement elsewhere pretty much
all social media companies use a mixture of algorithmic filtering and user
reports to fly potential problem posts which are then either automatically
hidden or sent to a human moderator for a manual review that last step however
is often optional even with thousands and thousands of moderators working
around the clock there's just too much content to sift through this can result
in both over and under moderation as rules get applied unevenly and often
without human oversight notable examples include tumblr's notorious Crackdown on
adult material which included a ban on female presenting nipples and a
moderation algorithm so aggressive it would flag any picture with a large
amount of beige or flesh tones as new
which is bad news for fans of Dune so what could happen if we add Community
note style consensus mechanisms to this conventional system we'll explore that
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cic.gc.ca to Miriam Webster's opinion on the origin of the word Riz but you don't
necessarily want their opinion on Taylor Swift's love life stay in your lane
Miriam by contrast Community notes contributors are wholly Anonymous and
might lack any relevant expertise in the subject they're assessing the only
Authority Community notes has is built onto the public perception that it is a
well- constructed system that creates good results it does have its own
advantages however in that it's a lot faster and has a much higher capacity
than traditional fact Checkers who typically have to f focus on the most important potential inaccuracies that's
why you get a lot of traditional factchecking for National politicians
but relatively little factchecking for local politicians who probably lie just
as often there's also a known problem where after the fact Corrections rarely
have the same verality in reach as the initial incorrect claim because they're
just not nearly as exciting or interesting George Clooney got married
to his own clone oops sorry no he didn't Community notes however can at least
stem the tide of a frequently repeated misconception because because they're
directly attached to the post making the original claim and can be easily spread
to copycat posts through the efforts of a few diligent community members these
Corrections are then immediately available to Anyone who reads these posts rather than buried deep in the
comments Community notes contributors can even magnify information from
traditional factchecking sources simply by linking to it we can think of these
two systems as being analogous to traditional academic sources and
crowdsource information like Wikipedia one of them is good enough to go in an
essay while the other is at least good enough for social media Community notes
is also a better supplement than a replacement for standard moderation
practices because it creates a middle ground that allows a platform to operate
with a gentler hand rather than always reaching for the banhammer or more
likely on elon's X doing nothing it's potentially a problem for public
discourse when important figures say offensive inaccurate or controversial
things and those comments are removed rather than preserved and corrected it's
also a known fact that many idea started out controversial so we should at least
try to be careful about which ideas we say aren't even worth hearing Community
note style fact cheing allows contrarians to at least speak their
minds there are also clear benefits to a system of user participation that
balances the power of individual contributors rather than allowing them
to consolidate power and act as Petty leege Lords over their own little
subdomains the way that Forum style platforms like Reddit do those some of
those mods man so now what do you think how would you improve a feature like
this what platforms would you add collaborative factchecking features to
should participation be financially incentivized or rewarded this is free
labor after all thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos
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forget to subscribe and follow and mail me a letter don't do that