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Community Notes can’t save social media from itself
It is not enough for Musk and Zuckerberg to hide behind the crowd. They need to remove the incentives that spur the spread of misinformation and disinformation on their platforms.
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The system has advantages over the alternatives, but its limits as an antidote to misinformation are clear.
PHOTO: ST FILE
Dave Lee and Carolyn Silverman
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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 Mr 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 Mr Musk, the system is the centrepiece of his “free speech” claims, a democracy that circumvents traditional gatekeepers of information. “You are the media,” he tells his 220 million followers.
