Latest news with #CommunityNotes
TechCrunch
19 hours ago
- Business
- TechCrunch
X tests highlighting posts that are liked by users with opposing views
X announced on Thursday that it's launching an experiment that will recognize posts that are liked by people who normally disagree. The experiment leverages the platform's crowdsourced Community Notes feature, which is currently used when content has been marked as misleading or incorrect. Starting Thursday, a subset of Community Notes contributors will see callouts to rate and provide feedback about certain posts. The callout will be shown based on the post's initial Like activity. X says that this feedback will help develop an open source algorithm that can identify posts liked by people with different perspectives. Image Credits:X Contributors will be asked to share what they like and dislike about the post . They will be able to select options like 'I learned something interesting' or 'I don't agree with it' when giving feedback. 'People often feel the world is divided, yet Community Notes shows people can agree, even on contentious topics,' X wrote in a post. 'This experimental new feature seeks to uncover ideas, insights, and opinions that bridge perspectives. It can bring awareness to what resonates broadly. It could motivate people to share those ideas in the first place. Ultimately, it could help move the world forward in ways that the people want.' X launched Community Notes in 2022 following Elon Musk's takeover of the social network, as it moved away from traditional fact-checking. Since then, the feature has been adopted by Meta's Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
Engadget
20 hours ago
- Business
- Engadget
X tests... centrism
Whatever your opinion of X, you probably don't think of it as a platform known for fostering agreement. The company is apparently trying to change that, though, and is in the early stages of an experiment that aims to boost posts that are widely agreeable to the site's users. With a new test , described by X as an "experimental pilot," the app will begin asking a small subset of users what they think of a particular post in their timeline. A screenshot shared by X shows that people can respond with a range of positive or negative opinions, like "it makes a meaningful point," "it's funny" or "it doesn't interest me." X will then use those responses to help it "develop an open source algorithm that could effectively identify posts liked by people from different perspectives." The concept is somewhat similar to Community Notes, which already attempts to take differing perspectives into account when ranking fact checks. The new program, though, isn't about surfacing fact-checked content but boosting posts that are likely to be, well, liked. X's post about the test suggests it has lofty goals. "This experimental new feature seeks to uncover ideas, insights, and opinions that bridge perspectives," the company wrote. "It can bring awareness to what resonates broadly. It could motivate people to share those ideas in the first place." Whether an open source algorithm based on data about users' likes can actually accomplish that, though, is unclear. A report published today by Pew Research shows that there is still a significant partisan divide in terms of how X is perceived and experienced by users. Overcoming that could be more difficult than boosting a few extra posts.
Axios
a day ago
- Axios
Exclusive: X piloting new program to elevate content users agree on
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.
CNET
29-05-2025
- General
- CNET
Don't Forget to Delete Your Data Before Leaving Facebook
2025 has seen a massive exodus of users leaving Facebook after the March announcement about the end of fact-checking. Community notes have replaced fact-checking, allowing users to add corrections or annotations to potentially misleading posts. This isn't the only change to moderation policies, and now there are plenty of users looking to delete the app entirely. However, many users have thousands of photos as well as other personal information they don't want to leave behind. If you're one of those people, read on to see how to get rid of your Facebook permanently, while snagging all your information on the way out. For anyone who's completely done with Facebook, deleting your account is the only way to fully separate yourself from the platform. If you aren't quite sure, deactivating your account can let you try life off Facebook without risking deletion. Downloading your data and deleting Facebook does take some time, but we have all the details for you on what to expect and how to save everything before you delete your account entirely. Before deleting your account, find and remove your third-party Facebook logins For years, third-party developers like Spotify and DoorDash have let you log in using your Facebook account. This allows you to log in without needing to remember another password, but if you're planning on deleting Facebook, you'll need to update your login settings. That's because if you delete your account first, there won't be a Facebook account for you to log in through. Thankfully, there's a simple way to discover which of your sites and apps are linked to Facebook, and disconnect them before deleting your account. To find and disconnect the online services linked to your Facebook account: Sign in to Facebook. Go to Settings & privacy > Settings > Apps and websites. (Apps and websites is on the left, but you'll need to scroll down a bit. It's nested under Your Activity.) Select Remove next to the associated app to remove the third-party login. Don't lose access to apps and services you use Facebook to log in to. Screenshot by Jason Cipriani/CNET After you disconnect other sites and apps from Facebook, you'll need to adjust how you log in to them moving forward. Navigate to those specific apps and sites to set new passwords or passkeys, or log in using another single-service sign-on option, like Google. What's the difference between deactivating and deleting your Facebook account? If you're trying to disengage from Facebook, you have two basic options. You can delete your account entirely, or you can deactivate it. Deactivating your Facebook account is temporary and could help if you're trying to spend less time on the app or you need a break from social media. Alternatively, deleting your account entirely means you'll no longer exist on the social media network. Whether you deactivate or delete your account, a few things will remain the same. Your profile, posts, photos and timeline will be inaccessible to other users. If anyone searches for your account, you won't appear in results. Likewise, any photos you've posted will disappear, including pictures other people were tagged in. Any third-party logins, like Spotify or Pinterest, will no longer work either, so you'll need to tweak how you log in to those accounts before deleting Facebook, unless you want to recover them later. Deactivating your account doesn't delete your data, and you can reactivate it whenever you like. The important thing to remember is that deactivating your account means Facebook can still track your online activity, especially if you use third-party logins. Deactivating your account means you can return to it, but once the 30-day period of deleting an account finishes, that account is gone forever. If you aren't ready to completely delete Facebook, deactivation is the way to go. When you deactivate your account, you'll still be able to send messages, and third-party logins will still work, though Facebook-related features will be disabled. What will deleting your Facebook account do (and not do)? Deleting your Facebook account will remove your visible presence from the social media network, but it doesn't remove everything you ever touched on the platform. Deleting Facebook also severs ties to Facebook Messenger, but your messages to friends will still be accessible to them. If you use your Facebook information to log in to MetaQuest, all information on MetaQuest will also be deleted. This includes your app purchases and your achievements. It also means you won't be able to return any apps through MetaQuest, and that all remaining store credits will disappear. Other Meta platforms, like Instagram and WhatsApp, won't be affected by a Facebook deletion. If you want to leave those platforms, you'll need to delete those accounts independently. Next, download all your personal data from Facebook Plenty of folks have been using Facebook for years to stay in touch with friends and family, or as an easy place to collect photos. If there's data on Facebook that you want to save before you delete your account, here's how to grab it. Log in to Facebook. Go to Settings & Privacy > Settings > Account Center. Select Your information and permissions. Select Download your information. Select Download or transfer information. Select the profiles you'd like to download information from. Select Next. When asked how much information you want, click Available information. Note that this includes everything except data logs, which are the records of details that can be associated with you. If you want those, click Specific types of information and make sure Data Logs is selected at the bottom of the list. Select Download to device. In the Create files to download options, click Date range and set it to All time. Leave the format set to HTML -- doing so puts your data in an easy-to-navigate format. To save high-resolution copies of photos and videos you've posted to Facebook, change the Media Quality option from Medium to High. Finally, click Create files. Facebook will then gather all your information and send you an email when it's ready to be downloaded. It can take some time for this to happen -- it's not an instant process. Make sure you grab all the personal data you want to keep before deleting your account. Screenshot by Jeff Carlson/CNET Finally, delete your Facebook account Once you've downloaded the data you don't want to lose from Facebook, the final step is to delete your account. Facebook will give you a list of items to consider before deleting your account. It includes info about downloading your information, and a reminder that if you're the sole admin of a Facebook Page it will be deleted unless you grant another account admin privileges. Once you're ready to go, here's how to delete your Facebook once and for all. Log in to Facebook. Go to Settings & Privacy > Settings > Account Center. Select Personal details under Account Settings. Select Account ownership and control. Select Deactivation or deletion. Choose the account or profile you want to delete. Select Delete account and then select Continue. Click Continue then follow the instructions to confirm. Screenshot by Jeff Carlson/CNET What if you change your mind and don't want to delete Facebook? Though deleting your Facebook profile is a permanent decision, it doesn't happen instantly. It takes 30 days for an account deletion to be completed in the system, which means you have time to cancel the process if you decide you want to keep your account. All you need to do is log back in to your account before reaching that 30-day mark.
The Journal
28-05-2025
- Business
- The Journal
Community Notes vanishes from X feeds, raising 'serious questions' amid ongoing EU probe
A USER-POWERED fact-checking system designed to curb misinformation on X, formerly Twitter, has quietly disappeared from user feeds. The unexplained disappearance of Community Notes, the social media site's main tool to stall the spread of misinformation, has raised questions whether the controversial Elon Musk-owned platform is meeting its legal obligations. Community Notes relies on user inputs to tag misleading posts on X and had been active since shortly after the takeover by Elon Musk in 2022 — a transition that saw the mass firing of staff whose jobs were to tackle hate speech, harassment, and misinformation. 'Persistent problems with Community Notes raise serious questions about X's capacity to meet its obligations under EU rules,' Eileen Culloty, Deputy Director of the DCU Institute for Media, Democracy, and Society told The Journal . 'Those rules say platforms need to have adequate measures for content moderation.' While the system still appears to be active — an official account that tracks posts tagged with community notes is still posting new content — these notes have not been appearing to users. A clear explanation for the disappearance is hard to glean from official X accounts. 'Community Notes on X are still active, with a recent update on May 19, 2025, to tackle manipulation, but many users report they're hard to see,' Grok, X's artificial intelligence chatbot said in response to a query on this. The most recent post from the official Community Notes account, on 26 May, reads, 'working to get notes appearing normally, as well,' in response to a post by X's official engineering account. That engineering post, published on 24 May, reads: 'We're still experiencing issues from yesterday's data center outage.' Posts from users complaining about this problem also appear on X at that date. A fire at a data centre in Oregon on 22 May has been suggested to have exacerbated technical issues at X. Advertisement 'X is a glitch-prone platform at the best of times and it recently suffered further disruption due to a fire at a data centre,' Culloty said. The Journal has reached out to X for further information. However, X's leader Elon Musk has been explicit that X does not respond to journalists queries, instead sending them 'infinite loops' of generic messages. Prior to that, the company would auto-respond with a poop emoji. The Community Notes system involves users signing up to be 'contributors' who leave notes on any X posts. 'If enough contributors from different points of view rate that note as helpful, the note will be publicly shown on a post,' X says. However, the Community Notes system has itself been used as a vector to spread disinformation . Studies have shown major spikes in hate speech since Musk took over X, as well as major failures to take down child sexual abuse material . 'Community Notes have been shown to be far from perfect', Aoife Gallagher, a Senior Analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism think-tank, told The Journal. 'They are open to manipulation and are often not published at all because a consensus has not been reached, meaning that information debunking a claim never reaches regular users of X. 'In saying that, when it works, it has been found to be useful. Its absence makes users of the platform even more vulnerable to consuming falsehoods.' Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced in March that it was replacing its fact checking partnerships in the United States with a similar Community Notes feature to that used on X. A spokesperson for the European Commission's representative on Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, said that they could not comment on the outage as a legal proceeding against X is ongoing. 'The Commission opened an investigation into X regarding, among others, effectiveness of measures taken to combat information manipulation on the platform, notably the effectiveness of X's so-called 'Community Notes' system in the EU and the effectiveness of related policies mitigating risks to civic discourse and electoral processes,' they wrote. Preliminary findings released last July by the Commission found that X was in breach of the Digital Services Act, citing misleading practices, a lack of transparency, and a failure to provide data to researchers. However, the Community Notes system was not cited in these preliminary findings. 'The issue is now entangled in broader geopolitical tensions between the EU and the US given Musk's relationship to Trump and stated opposition to EU regulations,' Eilleen Culloty told The Journal. Want to be your own fact-checker? Visit our brand-new FactCheck Knowledge Bank for guides and toolkits Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... It is vital that we surface facts from noise. Articles like this one brings you clarity, transparency and balance so you can make well-informed decisions. We set up FactCheck in 2016 to proactively expose false or misleading information, but to continue to deliver on this mission we need your support. Over 5,000 readers like you support us. If you can, please consider setting up a monthly payment or making a once-off donation to keep news free to everyone. Learn More Support The Journal
