title: Can Community Notes Replace Professional Fact-Checkers?
summary: Two commonly-employed strategies to combat the rise of misinformation on
  social media are (i) fact-checking by professional organisations and (ii)
  community moderation by platform users. Policy changes by Twitter/X and, more
  recently, Meta, signal a shift away from partnerships with fact-checking
  organisations and towards an increased reliance on crowdsourced community
  notes. However, the extent and nature of dependencies between fact-checking and
  helpful community notes remain unclear. To address these questions, we use
  language models to annotate a large corpus of Twitter/X community notes with
  attributes such as topic, cited sources, and whether they refute claims tied to
  broader misinformation narratives. Our analysis reveals that community notes
  cite fact-checking sources up to five times more than previously reported.
  Fact-checking is especially crucial for notes on posts linked to broader
  narratives, which are twice as likely to reference fact-checking sources
  compared to other sources. In conclusion, our results show that successful
  community moderation heavily relies on professional fact-checking.
paper_authors._id: 67b86819d00e69f10c1f31b9
paper_authors.name: Nadav Borenstein
paper_authors.status: claimed_verified
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paper_authors.fullname: Nadav Borenstein
paper_authors.type: user
paper_authors.user: Nadav
paper_authors._id: 67b86819d00e69f10c1f31ba
paper_authors.name: Greta Warren
paper_authors.status: claimed_verified
paper_authors.statusLastChangedAt: 2025-02-21T14:42:45.791Z
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paper_authors.avatarUrl: /avatars/e66d946c14595d3b008185f2be8d2f57.svg
paper_authors.fullname: Greta Warren
paper_authors.type: user
paper_authors.user: gretawarren
paper_authors._id: 67b86819d00e69f10c1f31bb
paper_authors.name: Desmond Elliott
paper_authors.status: admin_assigned
paper_authors.statusLastChangedAt: 2025-02-25T16:35:15.142Z
paper_authors._id: 6285f66a7cc3b7bc1b8e7b8e
paper_authors.avatarUrl: /avatars/984ae22db7cc885591bc0b5bceffdfbd.svg
paper_authors.fullname: Desmond Elliott
paper_authors.type: user
paper_authors.user: elliottd
paper_authors._id: 67b86819d00e69f10c1f31bc
paper_authors.name: Isabelle Augenstein
paper_authors.status: admin_assigned
paper_authors.statusLastChangedAt: 2025-02-25T16:35:20.535Z
paper_authors._id: 608918b7df398c3b285ce960
paper_authors.avatarUrl: https://cdn-avatars.huggingface.co/v1/production/uploads/1621507769190-608918b7df398c3b285ce960.jpeg
paper_authors.fullname: Isabelle Augenstein
paper_authors.type: user
paper_authors.user: IAugenstein
paper_title: Can Community Notes Replace Professional Fact-Checkers?
paper_summary: Two commonly-employed strategies to combat the rise of misinformation on
  social media are (i) fact-checking by professional organisations and (ii)
  community moderation by platform users. Policy changes by Twitter/X and, more
  recently, Meta, signal a shift away from partnerships with fact-checking
  organisations and towards an increased reliance on crowdsourced community
  notes. However, the extent and nature of dependencies between fact-checking and
  helpful community notes remain unclear. To address these questions, we use
  language models to annotate a large corpus of Twitter/X community notes with
  attributes such as topic, cited sources, and whether they refute claims tied to
  broader misinformation narratives. Our analysis reveals that community notes
  cite fact-checking sources up to five times more than previously reported.
  Fact-checking is especially crucial for notes on posts linked to broader
  narratives, which are twice as likely to reference fact-checking sources
  compared to other sources. In conclusion, our results show that successful
  community moderation heavily relies on professional fact-checking.
paper_ai_keywords: language models fact-checking community notes topics cited sources attributes claims misinformation narratives self-refuting community moderation professional fact-checking