“You are the media.”
Illustration: Taylor Tyson/Bloomberg; Bloomberg; Chris Unger and Pavlo Stavnichuk via Getty Images
Community Notes Can’t Save Social Media From Itself
The crowdsourced fact-checking system, which Meta adopted from X, is falling well short of stopping the spread of misinformation.
The billionaire leaders of social media giants have long been under pressure to quell the spread of mis- and disinformation. No system to date, from human fact-checkers to automation, has satisfied critics on the left or the right.
One novel approach winning plaudits recently has been Community Notes. The crowdsourced method, first introduced by Twitter before Elon Musk acquired it and rebranded it as X, allows regular users to submit additional context to posts, offering up supporting evidence to set the record straight. For Musk, the system is the centerpiece of his “free speech” claims, a democracy that circumvents traditional gatekeepers of information. “You are the media,” he tells his 220 million followers.