X’s fact-checking system, Community Notes, will be updated to send users direct messages notifying them whenever a post they’ve interacted with has received a correction. The change, which is not yet alive, was was announced by X owner Elon Musk. He did not share a time frame for its release.
The update attempts to address one of the biggest criticisms of community notes — that fixes arrive too late to matter. A misleading post can garner views and retweets while its accuracy is questioned, and by the time it’s corrected, the damage is done. By proactively notifying users when a post receives a correction, X tries to extend the reach of the note beyond the original post. This could also allow users who spread false information to issue their own mea culpa if they were duped.
X’s Community Notes system was first established when the company was still known as Twitter, before Musk’s acquisition.
The idea was to introduce a different way of dealing with misinformation on the platform, rather than requiring Twitter (now X) to be the central authority for moderation decisions. Instead, Community Notes contributors could suggest corrections and add important details or missing information to posts. Consensus is achieved when the people who rate the note as useful are those who they usually have different perspectivesand the note goes live.
A similar system has since been adopted by Meta as part of its wider overhaul last year, which saw the company end its partnerships with data controllers.
While Community Notes makes sense for a company looking to distance itself from the fact-checking business, it’s also difficult to scale. A Study 2025 of the feature from the Spanish fact-checking site Maldita found that 85% of suggested notes on X remain invisible to users and only 8.3% are published and made visible. A separate study conducted by the Digital Democracy Institute of America (DDIA), which included 1.76 million notes published on X between January 2021 and March 2025, pushed the percentage for unpublished notes even higher to 90%.
This weakens Community Notes as a system that displays information when it’s most needed, critics pointed out. Additionally, they’ve argued that people don’t know when a post they’ve seen or boosted gets a fix later, since there was no way to bring that information to their attention.
Musk’s proposal to send notifications to users via X Chat (DMs) will address the latter issue, at least, assuming it goes live. X was approached for comment, but a response was not immediately available.
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