X tries to speed up community notes with ‘lightning notes’

X is trying to speed up its crowdsourced fact-checking system, Community Notes. In the update, the company says it has “redesigned” the rating system that powers this feature so that user-generated notes can now appear in less than 20 minutes after a post is posted on its platform.

“Community Notes,” introduced in 2022, relies on other X users to fact-check or add missing context to posts on the platform. Participants are asked for their sources, and then other users rate the “usefulness” of the note. Authors also support posts that are “community flagged” to discourage them from trying to monetize misinformation. Now this whole process should go much faster.

According to X, these new “lightning notes” can “take effect as little as 14 minutes 33 seconds after writing and 18 minutes 20 seconds after the actual post is written.” The change could help address a long-standing criticism of the crowdsourced fact-checking system: that it moves too slowly compared to the speed of viral misinformation on the platform. For example, last year Bloomberg found that a community note on a viral tweet can take several hours to appear, and that often only a portion of users see fact-checking against the original tweet.

A new, faster system could make a difference, although it’s unclear how often the faster, “lightning-fast” version of the process will actually be used. Not all posts with incorrect information, distorted facts, or AI-generated images are immediately flagged for review, if they are flagged at all. X says the program has over 800,000 members worldwide, but some posts will likely still take much longer to get through the community notes process.