One of my favorite things about X/Twitter since Elon Musk took over the service in 2023 is 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.
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.
