Can Community Notes Replace Professional Fact-Checkers?
This research addresses the problem of misinformation on social media for policymakers and platforms by revealing that community moderation heavily depends on professional fact-checking, indicating an incremental insight into their interdependency.
The study investigated the relationship between professional fact-checking and community notes on social media, finding that community notes cite fact-checking sources up to five times more than previously reported, especially for posts linked to broader misinformation narratives.
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. Our results show that successful community moderation relies on professional fact-checking and highlight how citizen and professional fact-checking are deeply intertwined.