Can we trust Musk’s X?

Study finds most Community Notes remain unpublished

More than 90 per cent of X’s (formerly Twitter) Community Notes – a crowd-sourced verification system popularised by Elon Musk’s platform – are never published, a study said on Wednesday, highlighting major limits in its effectiveness as a debunking tool, reported AFP.

The study by the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA), which analysed the entire public dataset of 1.76 million notes published by X between January 2021 and March 2025, comes as the platform’s CEO Linda Yaccarino resigned after two years at the helm.

The community-driven moderation model – now embraced by major tech platforms including Facebook-owner Meta and TikTok – allows volunteers to contribute notes that add context or corrections to posts.

Other users then rate the proposed notes as “helpful” or “not helpful.” If the notes get “helpful” ratings from enough users with diverse perspectives, they are published on X, appearing right below the challenged posts.

“The vast majority of submitted notes – more than 90 percent – never reach the public,” DDIA’s study said.

“For a program marketed as fast, scalable, and transparent, these figures should raise serious concerns.”

Among English notes, the publication rate dropped from 9.5 per cent in 2023 to just 4.9 per cent in early 2025, the study said.

Spanish-language notes, however, showed some growth, with the publication rate rising from 3.6 per cent to 7.1 per cent over the same period, it added.

A vast number of notes remain unpublished due to lack of consensus among users during rating.

Thousands of notes also go unrated, possibly never seen and never assessed, according to the report.

“As the volume of notes submitted grows, the system’s internal visibility bottleneck becomes more apparent – especially in English,” the study said.

“Despite a rising number of contributors submitting notes, many notes remain stuck in limbo, unseen and unevaluated by fellow contributors, a crucial step for notes to be published.”

‘Viral misinformation’

In a separate finding, DDIA’s researchers identified not a human but a bot-like account – dedicated to flagging crypto scams – as the most prolific contributor to the program in English, submitting more than 43,000 notes between 2021 and March 2025.

However, only 3.1 per cent of those notes went live, suggesting most went unseen or failed to gain consensus, the report said.