One of my favorite things about X/Twitter since Elon Musk took over the service in 2023 are the hilarious and often brutal Community Notes that will bubble into your For You Feed — the notes being an attempt at crowdsourcing information that are often so good and so entertaining that the notes themselves go a bit viral.
Say what you will about Elon, but the Community Notes aspect of X is very much a game-changer for making the platform more of a real-time source of truth than a wild, anything goes free-for-all. And it’s a fact-checking system that covers almost anything, not just politics as seen in the examples above.
According to X’s overview of the feature, Community Notes doesn’t work according to majority rules. “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 … We believe giving people a voice to make these choices together is a fair and effective way to add information that helps people stay better informed.”
I’ve rounded up five recent Community Notes below that I found particularly entertaining, including one of my favorite kinds — the one-word note, arguably the most brutal of all. These are, by the way, in no particular order.
