Can Community Notes Replace Professional Fact-Checkers?
Authors: name: Nadav Borenstein; name: Greta Warren; name: Desmond Elliott; name: Isabelle Augenstein
Published: 2025-02-19 22:26:39

Abstract: Two commonly-employed strategies to combat the rise of misinformation on
social media are (i) fact-checking by professional organisations and (ii)
community moderation by platform users. Policy changes by Twitter/X and, more
recently, Meta, signal a shift away from partnerships with fact-checking
organisations and towards an increased reliance on crowdsourced community
notes. However, the extent and nature of dependencies between fact-checking and
helpful community notes remain unclear. To address these questions, we use
language models to annotate a large corpus of Twitter/X community notes with
attributes such as topic, cited sources, and whether they refute claims tied to
broader misinformation narratives. Our analysis reveals that community notes
cite fact-checking sources up to five times more than previously reported.
Fact-checking is especially crucial for notes on posts linked to broader
narratives, which are twice as likely to reference fact-checking sources
compared to other sources. In conclusion, our results show that successful
community moderation heavily relies on professional fact-checking.