X aims to combat rampant misinformation on the platform with new feature

Key Takeaways

X is introducing Lightning Notes to speed up the Community Note process.
Community Notes could now be on a post in under 20 minutes.
X reports that posts with Community Notes reduce its sharing by approximately 60 percent.

If you’re like me and spend a lot of time scrolling X (formerly Twitter), you’ll likely come across a lot of posts that have been hit with a Community Note. The issue with Community Notes is that sometimes a post with false information in it can be up for hours, with millions of people seeing it, before a Community Note can get added to it.

To address this, X has announced Lightning Notes, which will add Community Notes to posts faster than ever before. In a post on X, the Community Notes account said the following:

Ditch the X logo and bring back the Twitter app icon with iOS 18

If you’re tired of looking at X, iOS 18 lets you bring back the Twitter app logo with a few quick steps.

Community Notes were first introduced on X in 2022. The system relies on users to fact-check or add context to posts on its social media platform, which sees hundreds of millions of active users every day posting and viewing posts. When a user contributes to a Community Note, they are required to cite any sources they got their information from. Then other users rate the helpfulness of the note, and if its sourced properly and correct, it gets added to the post. Creators who get their posts hit with a Community Note don’t receive any revenue from it.

X says that posts hit with Community Notes reduce the sharing of a post by approximately 60 percent, and increases the deletion of posts by approximately 80 percent.

As someone who browses X every day, I have seen the value of Community Notes and think it’s a helpful system for the most part. Hopefully this new Lightning Notes program will help it, while still ensuring the notes are accurate and sourced properly. But only time will tell.