Beyond Community Notes: A Framework for Understanding and Building Crowdsourced Context Systems for Social Media
This work provides a foundational framework for researchers and practitioners to study and build CCS, addressing the need for human-centered approaches in social media information ecosystems, though it is incremental as it synthesizes existing research.
The paper tackles the problem of understanding and designing crowdsourced context systems (CCS) for social media, such as X's Community Notes, by conducting a systematic review of 56 studies and analyzing real-world implementations, resulting in a framework with a theoretical model and a design space covering six aspects.
Social media platforms are increasingly adopting features that display crowdsourced context alongside posts, a technique pioneered by X's Community Notes. These systems -- which we term Crowdsourced Context Systems (CCS) -- have the potential to reshape the information ecosystem as major platforms embrace them as alternatives to professional fact-checking. To understand the features and implications of these systems, we conduct a systematic literature review of existing CCS research (n=56) and analyze real-world CCS implementations. Based on our analysis, we develop a framework with two components. First, we present a theoretical model to conceptualize and define CCS. Second, we identify a design space encompassing six aspects: participation, inputs, curation, presentation, platform treatment, and transparency. We also surface normative implications of different CCS design and implementation choices. Our work integrates theoretical, design, and ethical perspectives to establish a foundation for future human-centered research on Crowdsourced Context Systems.