Less than 40% of community notes drafted in South Asian languages on X meet the visibility criteria, compared to over 65% success rate for those in English, according to research by the Centre for the Study of Organised Hate (CSOH). This failure arises from poor note quality and low reviewer density, the organisation contends. Accordingly, this shortfall allows rumours to circulate for long periods without any additional context, thereby creating an information gap between English-speaking users and others.
How do community notes function?
Community Notes (formerly known as Birdwatch) on X is a crowdsourced fact-checking feature enabling users to add contextual notes to misleading posts. Any individual with a longstanding, verified account on the platform is eligible to become a “contributor”, while newcomers begin as raters. Before being published, notes first enter an internal queue where other contributors classify them as “helpful”, “somewhat helpful”, or “not helpful”.
Later, notes with over a 40% helpfulness rating are published. Alternatively, the algorithm applies a “bridging” rule, where it checks whether the people who liked the note usually disagree with other notes. Notably, CSOH classifies this requirement as “arbitrary” and violative of how neutral community notes should function.