How to Use Twitter's Community Notes

A guide for dissidents

Twitter’s Community Notes feature is a powerful open-source moderation system. It’s like the secret final level of Twitter. This is a guide for how to access it, what it does and how to use it, and why every Twitter user who wishes to hold major public figures and media organizations accountable should be using it. As you’ll see it has powerful capabilities, but there are some rules you must learn if you wish to play. Bottom line: you should sign up for a Community Notes account if you are able to, and if you’re not, you should always rate good Community Notes, which you can always do as a regular Twitter user.

What is a Community Note?

A Community Note is a small block of text that appears beneath a tweet, above all other replies. Community Notes are submitted and chosen through an open-source process from anonymous contributors.

Here are some examples of community notes on tweets by politicians, media orgs, and others:

Here’s an example of a fact-checker from the Washington Post making a complaint about a Community Note appended to his original tweet. Notice how his complaint receives a follow-up Community Note providing additional context that addresses his claim!

As we can see, Community Notes (C Notes) give a powerful means for contextualizing statements from major public figures or media organizations which can often be inaccurate or inflammatory. Because they appear directly below Tweets, they have a major impact in shaping people’s response to how they perceive the information in the Tweet. They stand above the noise of regular comments, and can even appear on Tweets with comments turned off. Furthermore, they are approved through a democratic process that selects for neutrality and quality, so they carry the weight of the Twitter community behind them in a way that normal comments don’t.

How Do I Use Community Notes?

You can use Community Notes in one of two ways:

1. Sign up for a Community Notes account. Find the signup links here.

2. As a regular Twitter user, you can rate C Notes. Every time you rate a C Note, you help increase or decrease the likelihood that others will see the same C Note. You also improve or degrade the reputation of the account that wrote the C Note. Therefore you should always rate C Notes whether they are good or bad, using your honest opinion.

What is a Community Notes account?

Community Notes accounts are separate accounts linked to your Twitter with an anonymous ID. You have to apply for a C Note account. There are some account criteria:

1. Account must not have any recent Twitter rules violations

2. Account must be older than six months

3. Verify with a phone number from a trusted carrier

4. Not already associated with any other CN accounts

As you can see, there’s a higher bar for getting a C Note account than for regular Twitter. If you are on twitter anonymously, it might be best to set up or use an alternate account that is not involved in controversial activity.

It might take a few weeks to get approved, Twitter is going through a back-log of applicants and typically does them in batches. When you get approved you’ll be asked to select an anon ID which will be your identity within the Community Notes system.

OK I got my Community Notes account, now what?

Congrats, you’ve got your account. Now the fun begins.

Before C Notes get posted on Tweets, they go through a process where anonymous C Note accounts rate them for quality. This is not determined by simple majority. In order for C Notes to get published, they must be rated “Helpful” by contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. The system is designed to try to find neutral points of agreement between conflicting opinions.

To begin with, you will not be able to post C Notes, you will only be able to rate them. Twitter has a system where you must accrue reputation in order to post C Notes. You must accrue reputation (“Rating Impact”) a system that is essentially trying to select for good judgment. When you rate notes in the eval phase as “helpful” that later get voted “helpful” by Twitter users, you get more Rating Impact. If you rate a note helpful that later gets voted as unhelpful, your score decreases. So in order to accrue Rating Impact you need to able to correctly anticipate the judgment of the broader Twitter community.

With this in mind, here are some indicators of a good C Note:

• Cites high-quality sources

• Easy to understand

• Directly addresses the Tweet’s claim

• Provides important context

• Neutral or unbiased language

Once you accrue enough Rating Impact you will be allowed to write C Notes. When you see a Tweet, you’ll be able to open a C Note interface and write / submit your C Note.

If you have experience with editing Wikipedia, you can see the kind of tone you should be going for. You want to use a neutral “just the facts” voice, include citations, and in some cases you might want to use language that acknowledges an opposing perspective, particularly for high profile or controversial subjects. This will make it much more likely that a wider audience of people will rate your note as “helpful.”

What if I can’t get a Community Notes account?

Not to worry, you can still participate in an important way. If you see a Tweet that, in your opinion, needs a C Note, tag @CommunityNotes to flag it for review.

Next, when you see a C Note, you should always rate it. The more ratings the better. Remember that your rating directly improves the reputation of not only the writer but all the C Note accounts who evaluated it during the pre-publishing phase. Use your best judgement for your ratings, this will help improve the Community Notes system.

How does this help our efforts?

The mainstream media derives much of its power from its illusion of objectivity. Even when they print headlines that are inflammatory or designed to obfuscate the truth, they carry the weight of authority because for many decades they have been trusted as neutral fact-finders. Today, long after they have abandoned the practice of objectivity, they are still content to enjoy the benefits of the trust and authority associated with it. Therefore, in order to denude the media of its power, their biases and inaccuracies must be exposed wherever possible. Ideally there should be a Community Note on every single Tweet made by a MSM organization. This will degrade their reputation in the public sphere and put them on the defensive.

On a basic level, a broad application of this strategy would force MSM orgs to be more accurate, more circumspect and less inflammatory in their reporting. This will have salutary effects on public discourse. This is particularly vital as we go into another election cycle with the possibility of media-stoked violence. Community Notes could quite literally save some city from burning down the next time the media attempts to incite riots using false reporting.

A second effect would be that MSM orgs might call for the removal of the Community Notes feature, forcing them into further confrontations with Twitter. This would be a delicious irony when one considers that the precursor to Community Notes was Birdwatch, a moderation feature that journalists themselves strenuously advocated for.

This confrontation would be highly desirable because it would play out in the realm of public opinion. Another messy conflict with Twitter over moderation policy would demonstrate the MSM’s hypocrisy and sense of entitlement to the American public. They would be perceived as spoiled would-be tyrants attempting to seize back the levers of control, and they would be fighting from a position of weakness because they no longer have the privileged access to Twitter they enjoyed under the previous ownership.

A final scenario, which we might call our stretch goal or victory condition, might be that the MSM might decide to abandon Twitter entirely. Not only would this cut off an important channel of dissemination, but they would be forced to scale back their social media teams. With less organizational focus on Twitter, journalists would have less incentive to cultivate a Twitter presence. This would have a beneficial effect on general discourse, cut down on media doxxing, and allow for the growth of alternative media organizations.

Ultimately, this is a fight that the MSM would not be able to win, because there are few of them and many of us. They have a handful of enormously expensive and poorly defended accounts (see their troubles with impersonation as they refuse to pay for verification services), while anonymous Community Noters are many. The cost asymmetries, where MSM accounts have to defend successfully 100% of the time, while thousands of individual C Noters only have to be successful once, are such that if this effort is broad and sustained, the MSM cannot win.

To summarize the strategy, which I call 100% Community Notes Plan

1. Get as many friends as possible to use Community Notes

2. Use the Community Notes feature to CN as many MSM tweets as possible

3. Provoke the MSM into moderating its behavior, responding, or leaving