X CEO Linda Yaccarino Says Community Notes Could Come to News, Other Platforms

X would like to export its crowd-sourced fact-checking feature, Community Notes, to newspapers and other platforms, Chief Executive Officer Linda Yaccarino said at the VivaTech technology conference in Paris on Friday. “It is not impossible to imagine that this particular tool is shared by X to companies like yours, other platforms,” Yaccarino said, addressing fellow panelist Pierre Louette, chief executive officer of French newspaper group Groupe Les Echos-Le Parisien.

X, formerly Twitter, first launched a version of Community Notes in 2021 as a way for its users to fact-check misleading posts on the platform. Volunteers will add more context to potentially misleading user posts through additional notes, which are then voted on by other “noters.” X’s algorithms will then decide which context note should appear publicly against the misleading post.

Since buying the site in 2022, owner Elon Musk has pushed the tool as a bulwark against misinformation – and occasionally as a viable alternative to mainstream journalism.

There is evidence that the system is more effective for some topics than others. While it’s adept at fact-checking scientific or medical information, it has struggled with more contentious topics such as Israel’s war with Hamas, Bloomberg News reported.

Yaccarino said the system can “force out bias” and that there were more than 500,000 volunteers contributing to the system.

Elsewhere during the panel, Yaccarino echoed talking points popular with Musk, appearing to blame the legacy media for experiencing revenue declines as online ad spending moves to tech platforms such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Meta Platforms Inc.

“We’ve moved to a world of a clickbait mentality and a partisan news environment that actually works against the legacy revenue models,” said Yaccarino, who was formerly the head of NBCUniversal’s global ad business. “When you look at the point of origin of the problem, it is because we moved to this world where the fringe is loud, and we want someone to click first.”

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