Can crowdsourced fact-checking curb misinformation on social media?

While Community Notes has the potential to be extremely effective, the difficult job of content moderation benefits from a mix of different approaches. As a professor of natural language processing at MBZUAI, I’ve spent most of my career researching disinformation, propaganda, and fake news online. So, one of the first questions I asked myself was: will replacing human factcheckers with crowdsourced Community Notes have negative impacts on users? Wisdom of crowds Community Notes got its start on Twitter as Birdwatch. It’s a crowdsourced feature where users who participate in the program can add context and clarification to what they deem false or misleading tweets. The notes are hidden until community evaluation reaches a consensus—meaning, people who hold different perspectives and political views agree that a post is misleading. An algorithm determines when the threshold for consensus is reached, and then the note becomes publicly visible beneath the tweet in question, providing ad ... Read full article.