A Maldita study of nearly 1.2M Community Notes on X published globally in 2024 shows that professional fact-checkers are among the three most cited sources
Notes that cite fact-checkers earn more trust from X users and combat misinformation faster — When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced …
Context & Ripple Effects
The study lands as Meta has announced a U.S. shift from its fact-checking program to Community Notes a move to replace fact checking with Community Notes, while saying it would retain fact checkers elsewhere for the time being as it evaluates the system outside the U.S..
Its findings suggest that crowdsourced annotations do not operate independently of professional verification: the quality and perceived credibility of the sources participants cite remain central to the system’s usefulness.
First-order effects
- For Community Notes contributors, professional fact-checking outlets emerge as high-value citations: notes using them are associated with greater user trust and faster responses to misinformation.
- Professional fact-checkers retain a direct role in X’s information ecosystem even when they are not the platform’s sole or formal moderation mechanism.
Second-order effects
- Meta’s planned Community Notes rollout faces a practical design question: whether a crowdsourced system can preserve access to the professional evidence base that appears to improve note credibility.
- The result strengthens the case for platforms to measure not just whether notes are published, but which sources they cite and whether those notes become visible quickly—an issue raised by low public visibility for notes addressing false election claims.
Third-order effects
- If this pattern holds, moderation may settle into a hybrid model in which crowds supply context and consensus while professional fact-checkers supply much of the underlying evidentiary infrastructure.
- That hybrid outcome would challenge the framing of Community Notes as a full replacement for fact checking; later coverage has similarly found that Notes can fall short of stopping misinformation when misinformation spreads faster than annotations.
The trend: Crowdsourced moderation is increasingly being tested as a distribution layer for professional verification rather than a self-sufficient substitute for it.