Exclusive: X piloting new program to elevate content users agree on

Axios

05-06-2025

Elon Musk's X is piloting a new program to use its Community Notes feature to highlight posts where people of typically differing opinions actually agree with each other, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: The goal is to build momentum around opinions that are widely shared, which could help make conversations on and off X less polarizing.
How it works: Currently, Community Notes are used for content that has been marked as potentially misleading. Those notes are only featured in users' feeds when a note's content is deemed helpful by X users who typically disagree.
As a part of X's small pilot program, it will test Community Notes on posts that are not necessarily deemed as potentially misleading, as a way to foster more public conversations around issues where X believes people tend to have more common ground than is understood.
The pilot will start with a very small handful of Community Notes users in the U.S. before gradually expanding, said X's VP of product Keith Coleman.
Those selected to be part of the pilot will not be notified directly that they have been selected, but will start to see callouts in their main feeds to add context to everyday posts. (See image above.)
The callouts will be added to posts based on early and limited "like" engagement signals from those posts. Select contributors will be asked to rate and provide more feedback about each post, such as whether they think the content helps to unify a polarizing opinion or if it's funny.
That feedback will be used to help develop an open source algorithm to identifies posts liked by people from different perspectives, per Coleman.
Between the lines: X is using data from its existing Community Notes participants to help identify users with a range of viewpoints who will be a part of the pilot, Coleman said. The rest will be selected at random.
Those selected to participate will have a separate feed in their timelines that will guide them to more posts to add context.
Of note: For now, only selected participants from the pilot will be able to post Notes and see them in their feeds, Coleman said.
Eventually, all X users will be able to add Notes and see the posts with additional context in their feeds once X gathers enough data from its pilot.
Zoom out: Coleman joined Twitter in 2016 and was part of the team that helped build the original Community Notes program.
He said the rollout of X's new feature will mirror the way Twitter rolled out Birdwatch, now called Community Notes, in 2021.
The first cohort of people who were selected to pilot what is today Community Notes was just 1,000 people, Coleman notes.
The big picture: Once seen as a bold effort to replace fact-checking, X's Community Notes feature is now being adopted by other internet giants as a preferred way of moderating internet content.
Most notably, Meta eliminated fact-checkers in the U.S. in January, arguing they were too politically biased. It began testing community notes as a replacement, using open-source technology from X shortly thereafter.
The bottom line: Contrary to what the public may think about social media conversations, X's data shows that "there's actually quite a lot of agreement, even on controversial issues," Coleman said.
The pilot, he believes, has the potential to build momentum and energy around opinions that are widely shared, which could reshape social discourse and how we think about governing.
"It has potential to change the world," he said.