When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the end of the third-party fact-checking program on his company’s platforms, he said he would “get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes, similar to X.” But a new study shows that fact-checkers remain an essential part of X’s program, which YouTube also plans to adopt.
The study, conducted by Spanish fact-checking site Maldita, ranked professional fact-checkers among the three most cited sources on Community Notes, a feature on X that lets users add context to misleading posts. The top sources also include other posts on X and Wikipedia. The study also found that users trust notes citing an accredited organization more, helping them appear faster on misleading posts and allowing misinformation to be addressed before it spreads further.
“The evidence from X clearly shows that users frequently rely on fact-checking organizations when proposing Community Notes,” said the study’s report, which analyzed nearly 1.2 million notes written globally in 2024, including proposed ones.
Community Notes’ reliance on organizations certified by the International Fact-Checking Network and the European Fact-Checking Standards Network is “an impressive demonstration of trust by X users,” especially given that Elon Musk, the platform’s owner, is “so intent on destroying our credibility at every step,” said Carlos Hernández-Echevarría, the report’s lead author, in an email interview with Poynter.
“The study shows a clear underlying appreciation and trust for the usefulness of the work of fact-checking organizations and further demonstrates that, one, ‘crowdsourced’ fact-checking cannot really be effective without professional fact-checking organizations, and two, crowdsourced detection is useful, but professional, methodological, standardized collaboration is essential alongside it,” Hernández-Echevarría said.
Despite the higher trust in community notes citing fact checks, 85% of notes remain invisible to users on X, according to the report. On average, only 8.3% of proposed notes become visible, rising to as much as 15.2% when linked to a verification organization.
The reason for the low visibility rate is that Community Notes requires agreement among users with different political views before a note is shown. Maldita’s study recommends that platforms revise or, in Meta’s case, select a lower threshold of agreement to prioritize factual accuracy.
That agreement requirement weakens Community Notes’ ability to surface accurate information when it is most needed, said Lucas Graves, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies the fact-checking movement worldwide. “Even on X, users participating in the Community Notes program clearly rely heavily on fact-checking. But at the same time, the structure of the program actually prevents many notes that bring professional fact checks into the conversation from becoming visible,” Graves said.
Graves noted that as more platforms consider adopting Community Notes-style systems (in addition to Meta’s platforms, YouTube plans to employ the setup), the focus should shift to designing them in ways that encourage reliance on professionally vetted information, including contributions from fact-checkers. However, the decline of direct partnerships between platforms and fact-checkers remains a major setback, because those collaborations have historically been a more effective way to combat viral misinformation, he said.
For MediaWise director Alex Mahadevan, who has studied Community Notes’ evolution from Birdwatch, the main takeaway is that real fact-checkers are essential to both the speed and scale of crowdsourced fact-checking.
“If these companies truly care about addressing misinformation at scale, they should include professional fact-checkers in conversations about these trust and safety experiments,” he said.
Hernández-Echevarría, who heads public policy at Maldita, said Community Notes that cite evidence from fact-checkers appear 90 minutes earlier than general notes, giving platforms a better chance to address misinformation before it spreads. The study also found that notes citing certified organizations are proposed 23 minutes faster and become visible 24 minutes sooner than the median time after being rated as useful.
Maldita’s team, including lead researcher Marina Sacristán Hidalgo, analyzed all 1,175,837 Community Notes available for public download from X’s archives in 2024, both visible and hidden. They tracked when notes were proposed, how quickly they appeared and which sources were cited. The study grouped notes by language, examined citation patterns and assessed the impact of 179 fact-checking organizations verified by EFCSN and IFCN on user trust.
(Source: Maldita’s Community Notes report)
Mahadevan said X will have more success with the program if it involves fact-checkers and balances its consensus model with a system that better tracks the quality and accuracy of notes.
Mahadevan urged fact-checkers to participate actively in the ongoing Community Notes program in order to understand the evolution of online moderation efforts. “Join the community and contribute,” he said, adding, “This (study) shows that fact-checkers need to sign up and start leaving notes with their links.”
