Use of Community Notes on Elon Musk's X has plummeted in 2025, data shows

Yahoo

19 hours ago

Participation is plummeting in the community-driven feature that X owner Elon Musk touted as the solution to the social media site's misinformation problems.
Submissions to X's Community Notes, which add user-generated context and corrections to the platform's posts, have cratered this year, according to an NBC News analysis of X data. Fewer submissions has led to fewer notes getting displayed. And the number of notes isn't the only issue: In May, technical glitches led to the disappearance of notes from the main X site, which X acknowledged in a post.
Musk, who once routinely touted the feature, now rarely mentions it.
The system saw a peak of nearly 120,000 user-created notes in January. But the monthly counts have been cut in half since then, with fewer than 60,000 in May. Only a small percentage of notes created are displayed on the site, and displayed notes have declined by similar proportions, according to the analysis. Worldwide, traffic to X has ticked down since January from about 4.7 billion visits to 4.4 billion in May, according to estimates provided to NBC News from the analytics company Similarweb, though the rate of decline in Community Notes submissions is sharper than the rate of traffic decline.
The drop in Community Notes submissions began in February, the same month Musk said without evidence that the system was being gamed by foreign governments and needed to be fixed.
For a Community Note to be posted, an approved contributor must submit it for review. Then, other Community Notes contributors vote on contributions to certain posts, and an algorithm determines which contributions are ranked most 'helpful' by a diverse group of voters.
A spokesperson for X attributed the decline to 'natural swings in note volume based on world events.'
'[Last year] was a big year in that regard,' the spokesperson said in an email, citing high volumes around elections worldwide.
In 2025, misinformation about a variety of non-election-related topics has gone viral on the site, from videos about the U.S. Agency for International Development to lies about the Los Angeles wildfires.
X is also adjusting its algorithm to reduce the need for notes, the spokesperson said: 'If people are seeing fewer posts that might benefit from notes, they'll naturally feel less of a need to write or request a note.'
The notes' decline has real stakes for X. Experts say the dwindling submission numbers to Community Notes could run the social media site afoul of European regulators, who were already investigating the company over its ability to meet European Union regulations. The European Union's Digital Services Act requires certain sites such as X to reduce, via content moderation tools, the amount of misinformation published.
'In Europe, keeping Community Notes functional isn't a nice-to-have,' Matt Navarra, a social media consultant in the U.K., told NBC News. 'It's a compliance issue.'
The product that would become Community Notes debuted with the name Birdwatch in 2021. That was before Musk's October 2022 purchase of the company, when it was still called Twitter. According to current documentation, 'Community Notes aims to create a better-informed world, by empowering people on X to collaboratively add helpful notes to posts that might be misleading.'
After Musk rebranded the product, he quickly scaled access to it for users, beginning in December 2022, as he pulled back on content moderation and shifted the platform's policies. The company cut employees who worked on election integrity and countering misinformation, loosened rules around hate speech, and reinstated the accounts of extremists who had been banned. X also churned through trust and safety leads.
By 2024, Community Notes had taken off. X data shows note submissions had been climbing steadily. X CEO Linda Yaccarino told a marketing convention audience in April that the company had expanded Community Notes from 70 countries in May 2024 to 200 in 2025. The system has also been adopted by other platforms. Meta announced in March that it was using some of X's technology for its own Community Notes system, and TikTok announced a similar feature called Footnotes in April.
When a Community Notes note is displayed alongside a post, the spread of that particular piece of misinformation is kneecapped, Keith Coleman, a vice president at X who works with the Community Notes team, said on a podcast: 'The thing will be going viral, note appears, resharing drops 50-60% and that's it. The virality quickly goes to zero.'
Many X users now regularly turn to the platform's artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, for fact-checking and context, though that has not been without its own issues.
Still, the decline could be particularly problematic for a system that relies on volunteers who have faith that their time and effort are contributing to something valuable.
'When users stop seeing notes, they stop believing the system works, and that's when the trust dies,' Navarra said. 'So, yeah, absolutely, volume matters. The more notes being written and shown, the more coverage you get for viral posts, misleading content and general misinformation.'
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com