What is Community Notes?
Simply put, it is a feature that helps people flag misleading information and tweets on the platform. “It empowers people on Twitter to collaboratively add helpful notes to Tweets that might be misleading,” is how Twitter describes it.
How do Community Notes work?
Community Notes works in three stages or has rather three elements. These are notes, ratings and the Community Notes site. People can sign up as Contributors and then can add notes to any tweet, that they think are or might be misleading in nature.
Notes, meanwhile, have multiple-choice questions and an open-text field where contributors can explain why they believe a tweet is misleading. Further, they can add links to relevant sources to substantiate their claims. All these Contributions are public, and anyone can browse the Community Notes site to see them. “Notes that earned a status of “Helpful” appear directly on tweets,” explains Twitter in a blog post.
Ratings are something that help identify which notes are most helpful, and allow Community Notes to raise the visibility of those found most helpful by people from different perspectives. “Ratings also inform our reputation models that recognise those whose contributions are consistently found helpful by a diverse set of people,” says Twitter.
The Community Notes site is the home for all notes and ratings, separate from the main Twitter apps.
Community Notes works differently than the rest of Twitter as it is not “ a popularity contest. It aims to find notes that many people from different points of view will find helpful,” says Twitter. Further, it takes into account not only how many ratings a note has received, but also whether people who rated it helpful seem to come from different perspectives. “Because notes need to genuinely be found helpful by people who tend to disagree, the program is more likely to identify notes that many people find helpful,” explains Twitter.
How to become a Contributor on Community Notes?
Twitter clearly states that to become a Community Notes contributor, accounts must have not received any recent notice of Twitter Rules violations; joined Twitter at least 6 months ago; and have a verified phone number. This is done with the intention to reduce spam and the likelihood of abusive contributions. “These make it more likely that contributors are real people instead of bots or adversarial actors,” says Twitter.
