There are few things we tweeters can agree on now, but there are some. One is that we will never call Twitter “X” no matter how much Elon Musk insists on killing the blue bird and replacing it with the logo of the bad guy from ‘Action Man’. Another that community notes are one of the best inventions of the social network since the billionaire came to power. And as a great invention… it probably won’t last long.
No, listen, it’s not like that
Community notes are, basically, Twitter’s way of fact-checking on the spot, correcting those who tell lies or inaccurate data in their tweets: politicians, columnists and opinion makers in general see how their most controversial messages have a note under them giving the correct information that they have decided to ignore. And who gives it? The community. That is exactly what this social network was born for, and the applause is practically unanimous.
44 countries around the world, at least for the moment, enjoy this way of doing justice in writing. The thing has been working for a few months now and it is one of the easiest and, why not say it, funniest ways to see the lies at a glance. Of course, not just any note from the community will do: they have to be valued as useful for the algorithm to decide to bring them to light. In other words, Twitter does not decide what is seen under the tweets, but the users do.
Well, this is very nice, but then… Why do we say that they are probably going to close the shutter if they are so useful? There are two reasons for that: the first is that out of some 122,000 notes that have been written, barely 11,000 have ended up being seen. And that’s because different members of the political spectrum in the community have to agree, and that leads to, for example, 50% of people thinking that vaccines are effective… and another 50% that they are not. These are objective data, of course they are effective, but because there is no consensus there are clarifications that remain in limbo.
The other is much more trivial: Elon Musk, the CEO, got a note from the community on one of his tweets and ordered not only to remove it, but also that, in general, they could not be posted on his account. He does not put fake news by decree law. And when something pisses off the owner of Twitter it doesn’t usually bode well. Anyway, don’t you have the strange feeling that in a year’s time we won’t be talking about Twitter because this man will have transformed it into something completely different? And no, in this case the change is not a positive thing.
