Community Notes Guide
Community Notes is a collaborative way to add helpful context to Tweets and keep people better informed
Community Notes is a pilot program that aims to create a better-informed world. It empowers people on Twitter to collaboratively add helpful notes to Tweets that might be misleading.
Contributors write and rate notes
Contributors are people on Twitter, just like you, who chose to enroll in the pilot to write and rate notes. The more people that participate, the better the program becomes. Learn more about how Community Notes works.
Only notes that people find helpful appear on a Tweet
Communtity Notes doesn’t work by majority rules. To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, notes require agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings. Learn more about how the program identifies helpful notes.
Twitter doesn’t choose what shows up, the people do
Twitter doesn’t write, rate or moderate notes (unless they break the Twitter rules.) We believe giving people a voice to make these choices together is a fair and effective way to add information that helps people stay better informed.
Contributors can suggest a note on any Tweet. Notes are then rated for helpfulness by other contributors. Notes are only shown on Tweets if they are rated helpful by enough people from different perspectives. See how Community Notes defines and uses differences of perspectives here.
Community Notes works differently than the rest of Twitter. It is not a popularity contest. It aims to find notes that many people from different points of view will find helpful. It takes into account not only how many ratings a note has received, but also whether people who rated it helpful seem to come from different perspectives. Because notes need to genuinely be found helpful by people who tend to disagree, the program is more likely to identify notes that many people find helpful. Read the full details of how this works.
Notes are also subject to Twitter rules and can be reported.
We believe regular people can valuably contribute to identifying and adding helpful context to potentially misleading information. Many of the internet’s existing collaborative sites thrive with the help of non-expert contributions — Wikipedia, for example — and, while it’s not a cure-all, research has shown the potential of incorporating crowdsourced based approaches as part of a broader toolkit to address misleading information on the internet, for example:
- Allen, Arechar, Pennycook, and Rand 2021
- Resnick, Alfayez, Im, and Gilbert 2021
- Bhuiyan, Zhang, Sehat, and Mitra 2020
- Kim and Walker 2020
In our pilot test of Community Notes, we evaluated notes would be shown on Tweets, and have found:
- The majority of people surveyed on Twitter found notes helpful.
- People in surveys were 20-40% less likely to agree with the substance of a potentially misleading Tweet after reading the note about it, compared to those who saw a Tweet without a note.
- Most notes have been rated highly on accuracy by professional reviewers; it has been rare to find a note that reviewers agree is inaccurate.
The people on Twitter span a wide gamut of backgrounds and experiences, and we believe that, working together, they can help create a better-informed world.
As a Tweet author, if you disagree that a note provides important context about your Tweet, you can request additional review.