Community Note usage by X in the year 2025 has experienced a significant decline, according to data available.
Engagement with Elon Musk's Community Notes feature, touted as a remedy for X's misinformation woes, has taken a nosedive. According to NBC News' analysis of X data, submissions to this user-generated feature have nosedived this year, resulting in fewer notes being displayed.
A drop in note submissions isn't the only problem. In May, technical glitches caused notes to vanish from X's main site, an issue X itself acknowledged in a post. Once a regular topic of pump, Musk now scarcely discusses the feature.
The system peaked with nearly 120,000 user-generated notes in January, but the monthly counts have halved since then, dipping below 60,000 in May. Only a handful of notes make it to the site, and displayed notes have plummeted by similar margins, NBC News reports. Globally, X traffic has dipped slightly since January from about 4.7 billion visits to 4.4 billion in May, according to analytics company Similarweb, although the rate of decline in Community Notes submissions is sharper.
The decline in contributions started in February, the same month Musk, without evidence, claimed the system was being manipulated by foreign governments and needed fixing.
There are a few reasons that could explain the dwindling participation:
- Hidden Notes: The once crucial feature for fact-checking and providing context disappeared from user feeds on X, causing concerns, particularly under ongoing EU probes into X's misinformation handling[5].
- Complicated Engagement: Lack of direct notifications hinders user engagement. Instead, contributors are dependent on spotting callouts in their main feeds[3].
- Polarization and Agreements: The feature's efficacy in reducing political division is still being tested. Identifying content that resonates across ideological lines poses a considerable challenge[1][2].
- Misinformation and Fact-Checking: Despite being intended to combat misinformation, current issues suggest that addressing misinformation effectively remains a daunting task[5].
The drop in contributions to Elon Musk's Community Notes feature might be due to the disappearance of the once crucial fact-checking feature from user feeds on X, causing concerns, particularly under ongoing EU probes into X's misinformation handling. Furthermore, a lack of direct notifications and the challenge of identifying content that resonates across ideological lines could also be reasons for the dwindling participation in social-media entertainment platforms like X. Technology advancements, including the Community Notes feature, are intended to enhance and improve our social-media experiences; however, the unsettling decline in engagement suggests that the battle against misinformation and the need for effective fact-checking remain pressing issues in the realm of online entertainment and communication.
