I did an exploration into how Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) from X (formerly Twitter) works, and how its algorithm decides which notes get displayed to the wider community. In this post, I’ll share and explain what I found, as well as offer some comments.

Community Notes is a fact-checking tool available to US-based users of X/Twitter which allows readers to attach notes to posts to give them clarifying context. It uses an open-source bridging-based ranking algorithm intended to promote notes which receive cross-partisan support, and demote notes with a strong partisan lean. The tool seems to be pretty popular overall, and most of the criticism aimed toward it seems to be about how Community Notes fails to be a sufficient replacement for other, more top-down moderation systems.[1]

This seems interesting to me as an experiment in social technology that aims to improve group epistemics [...]

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Outline:

(01:06) How does the ranking algorithm work?

(06:03) Some further details and comments

(11:12) Academic commentary

(13:06) Conclusion

The original text contained 12 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.