X’s Community Notes System Fails to Publish 90% of Submissions

More than 90% of X’s Community Notes, a crowd-sourced verification system popularized by Elon Musk’s platform, are never published, according to a study released Wednesday. This revelation underscores significant limitations in the system's effectiveness as a debunking tool. The study, conducted by the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA), analyzed 1.76 million notes published on X between January 2021 and March 2025. The findings come at a time when the platform’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, has resigned after two years in the role.

The community-driven moderation model, now adopted by major tech platforms, allows volunteers to contribute notes that add context or corrections to posts. Other users then rate these proposed notes as “helpful” or “not helpful.” If enough users with diverse perspectives rate the notes as “helpful,” they are published on X, appearing right below the challenged posts. However, the study found that the vast majority of submitted notes—more than 90%—never reach the public. This raises serious concerns about the system's transparency and scalability, as it was marketed to be fast and efficient.

Among English notes, the publication rate dropped from 9.5% in 2023 to just 4.9% in early 2025. In contrast, Spanish-language notes showed some growth, with the publication rate rising from 3.6% to 7.1% over the same period. The study attributed this disparity to a lack of consensus among users during the rating process, as well as thousands of notes going unrated and possibly never seen or assessed. This internal visibility bottleneck is particularly apparent in English, where the volume of notes submitted continues to grow.

Despite the increasing number of contributors submitting notes, many remain stuck in limbo, unseen and unevaluated by fellow contributors. This is a crucial step for notes to be published. The study also identified a bot-like account dedicated to flagging crypto scams as the most prolific contributor to the program in English, submitting more than 43,000 notes between 2021 and March 2025. However, only 3.1% of those notes went live, suggesting that most went unseen or failed to gain consensus.

The study noted that the time it takes for a note to go live had improved over the years, dropping from an average of more than 100 days in 2022 to 14 days in 2025. However, even this faster timeline is far too slow for the reality of viral misinformation, timely toxic content, or simply errors about real-time events, which spread within hours, not weeks. The findings are significant as tech platforms increasingly view the community-driven model as an alternative to professional fact-checking, which conservative advocates have long accused of a liberal bias.

Studies have shown that Community Notes can work to dispel some falsehoods, such as vaccine misinformation, but researchers have long cautioned that it works best for topics where there is broad consensus. Some researchers have also cautioned that Community Notes users can be motivated by partisan motives and tend to target their political opponents. X introduced Community Notes during the tenure of Yaccarino, who said on Wednesday that she had decided to step down after leading the company through a major transformation. No reason was given for her exit, but the resignation came as Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok triggered an online firestorm over its anti-Semitic comments that praised Adolf Hitler and insulted Islam in separate posts on X.