X Improves the Speed of Community Notes Being Displayed

X is looking to increase the turnaround time for Community Notes, with a new initiative that will see notes displayed on queried posts faster than ever in the app.

Today, X has outlined a new project called “Lightning Notes”, which, in testing, has seen some notes added to posts within less than 15 minutes of the note being written.

As explained by X:

“People want fast notes, so we re-architected the system to score notes faster. Since rolling this out, we’ve seen notes go live in as little as 14m33s after being written, and 18m20s after the post itself was written.”

For context, up till now, Community Notes, in general, have taken around an hour or more to appear on a post after it’s been flagged to the Community Notes contributor group.

The process works like this:

• X user taps the “Request Community Note” option from the three dots menu on a post
• The Community Notes contributor group is alerted to the post for review
• An approved Notes contributor reviews the post, checking for accuracy and relevant info, and submits a proposed Note where valid
• The proposed Note is then reviewed (by another Notes contributor of varying political perspective), before finally being shown on the post, or not, depending on the process

So it takes time, but now, X believes that it can get that down to just minutes in certain circumstances.

Which would be a significant advance for the process, though I’d question whether it’s possible for “Lightning Notes” to be deployed at scale for all, or even most of the posts flagged in the system at any given time.

I mean, logically, with 800,000 Community Notes contributors, dealing with however many Notes per day, based on the 500 million or so posts submitted to the app, that’s a lot of manual work to be putting in to get Notes up as quickly as possible. And really, getting all of those Notes displayed to users within minutes is not feasible, but X says that now, any Community Notes that’s displayed within less than an hour of the post being published will show a lightning bolt icon to reflect this effort.

Which is important, because research has shown that the faster a Community Note goes up, the more it reduces the impact of misinformation.

But then again, really, even an hour is long enough for a post to have a significant impact. And with the most followed user of the app also amplifying false claims to hundreds of millions of users, even half an hour between publishing and a note being added will be too long in many cases.

Which has always been the flaw with Community Notes, that the process simply takes too long to be truly effective as a misinformation mitigation measure. It’s a good system, enabling users to play a part in addressing false reports, and a handy complement to an established moderation process. But X is putting too much reliance on Community Notes to be its central moderation pillar, and it’s not made to be relied upon at that level.

But the Community Notes team has done a lot of work to improve the system, which also now includes retrospective alerts on posts that you’ve engaged with which have since had a Community Note added.

Faster Notes is another important improvement, though there are other factors at play, as well as inherent limitations within the process, which could negate the true value of this element.