50 Times X Users Got Owned By Fact-Checkers Who Did Their Jobs Well

As we’ve covered on Bored Panda recently, some people like to believe in conspiracy theories because it gives them a sense of control in a chaotic and confusing world. The scarier and more uncertain a situation is, the more likely that people will cling to theories that, though inaccurate, help them make sense of the world. 

Conspiracy theories aren’t backed by evidence. The people who believe in them discount any evidence that doesn’t support them. However, if you’re willing to consider evidence and are open to changing your mind when given solid proof, you’re less likely to fall victim to a conspiracy theory.

The world doesn’t objectively become a less complicated place because someone chooses to believe simplistic black-or-white narratives. It’s up to us to look for the nuances and embrace them, even if they’re uncomfortable or don’t match our subjective experiences or political leanings. 

A good rule of thumb is to be extremely wary of claims that are overly simplistic or have very clear heroes and villains. The world is more complicated than clean and clear fights between perfect good and total evil. That’s why context, provided by reliable sources, matters so much. 

Over 693.6K people follow @cnviolations, aka ‘community notes violating people,’which documents some of the most epic takedowns of misinformation, as done by members of the @communitynotes project—a real program meant to combat lies on X.

The @cnviolations account on X is in no way affiliated with the social network, nor the @communitynotes program. However, indirectly, it shares a lot of comedic moments and also shows to what extent some social media users twist the truth or believe in others’ lies.

The actual Community Notes project has 782.8K followers and describes itself as a collaborative way to add helpful context to posts. This way, everyone using X or reading tweets (or are those called Xs now?) elsewhere, can stay better informed.

Though it’s no panacea, the project does reduce the number of people who are misled. All with the power of helpful notes!

The people who contribute to the Community Notes mission are regular users of the X social network. They sign up to write and rate notes. As the founders of the project point out, “the more people that participate, the better the program becomes.” It’s not like random notes show up on posts all over X, however.

Only notes that are rated helpful by people “from diverse perspectives” appear on posts.

“To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, notes require agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings,” the Community Notes team explains in detail.

They believe that it’s vital to give X users a voice in providing informative, diverse context to posts on the network. 

One of the fundamental values of Community Notes is transparency. “All contributions are published daily, and our ranking algorithm can be inspected by anyone,” the founders point out that anyone is able to see how things work “under the hood.” It’s nice to see that they’re staying consistent on the importance of openness in everything that they do.

Any contributor can suggest a note on any post. Other contributors then rate those notes. However, it’s not a popularity contest by any means. “Because notes need to genuinely be found helpful by people who tend to disagree, the program is more likely to identify notes that many people find helpful.”

One question that X users have is whether other users can be trusted to add context to other people’s posts.

“We believe regular people can valuably contribute to identifying and adding helpful context to potentially misleading information. Many of the internet’s existing collaborative sites thrive with the help of non-expert contributions—Wikipedia, for example—and, while it’s not a cure-all, research has shown the potential of incorporating crowdsourced-based approaches as part of a broader toolkit to address misleading information on the internet,” the Community Notes team explains.

According to surveys conducted by the project, people were 20 to 40% less likely to agree with potentially misleading posts if they could read a note attached to them.