X's Community Notes aren't flagging election misinformation

X (Twitter)'s crowdsourced fact-checking tool is failing to accomplish the one thing its designed to do: Flag rampant misinformation.

A new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate — a recent legal target of X CEO Elon Musk — found that the platform's Community Notes feature is not successfully reaching the majority of platform users. While more than 160,000 X users had proposed notes in 2024, a majority of relevant fact-checking flags went missing on election- and politics-specific posts. Even when used correctly, validated Community notes failed to be displayed on nearly 75 percent of posts sharing election misinformation. Such erroneous posts had amassed more than 2 billion impressions.

"Community Notes are generated by a system in which anonymous users sign up, write and rate labels for posts that provide fact-checks or provide context or missing information to misleading posts," wrote the center's CEO Imran Ahmed. "X’s innovation in community-based decentralized fact-checking was – we generously assume – intended to be a democratic and transparent process where communities hash out debates and agree on mutually established facts. Of course, social media, like our democracies, does not operate this way."

X's reliance on what the center calls an "imperfect system" of community fact-checking, and the tool's alleged lack of reach, presents a startling reality ahead of what may be an radically contested presidential election, already strife with partisan misinformation intended to discredit the process and invalidate the results. And recent research, lauded by X, has found that more and more users trust Community Notes over expert fact-checking.

In a separate data analysis, the Washington Post confirmed the tool's unreliable appearance, adding that when notes do appear, they are four times more likely to be approved on posts from Republican politicians than from Democrats. The study found that 1 in 10 of Musk’s own X posts have received proposed notes.

Earlier this week, X announced that it was upgrading the Community Notes tool ahead of the election in order to address complaints that notes are increasingly slow to appear on the site. The upgrade, referred to as Lightning Notes, will apparently allow notes to appear less than 20 minutes after a post is published. Still, the notes can only show up on posts that are already flagged — and many fall through the moderation gap.

That's not the only disinformation problem plaguing the platform ahead of the 2024 election. A BBC investigation from this week outlined growing networks of accounts that are cashing in on misinformation's snowball effect online. Harnessing dozens of such accounts, the lucrative networks post, and then amplify, each other's election misinformation, AI-generated images, and conspiracy theories in order to build engagement with premium accounts and thus higher payouts.

"Posts without Community Notes promoting false narratives about US politics have garnered billions of views, outpacing the reach of their fact-checked counterparts by 13 times," the center explained in its report. "Community Notes is not a panacea for X’s problems."