Study: 90% of X’s Community Notes never get published

Even though Community Notes are a popular tool for X users to verify and correct content on the social media platform, popularized by the X owner Elon Musk, it turns out that most of them never get to see the light of day, a new study has shown.

Indeed, more than 90% of Community Notes on X never get published, according to the study by the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA), which analyzed the entire public dataset of 1.76 million notes published by X between January 2021 and March 2025, per a report on July 10.

How X’s Community Notes work

As it happens, the community-driven moderation model behind Community Notes enables individuals to suggest context or corrections to posts, after which other users rate them as ‘helpful’ or ‘not helpful,’ and those that get ‘helpful’ ratings from enough users with diverse perspectives, appear below the relevant posts.

According to the researchers:

“The vast majority of submitted notes – more than 90% – never reach the public. (…) For a program marketed as fast, scalable, and transparent, these figures should raise serious concerns.”

Furthermore, the publication rate of English-language notes dropped from 9.5% in 2023 to only 4.9% in early 2025, but notes in Spanish experienced some growth, with the publication rate growing from 3.6% to 7.1% over the same period.

That said, one reason behind such a vast number of notes remaining unpublished could be the lack of consensus among users during rating or missing ratings to begin with, leaving thousands of notes unrated. As the study explained:

“As the volume of notes submitted grows, the system’s internal visibility bottleneck becomes more apparent – especially in English. (…) Despite a rising number of contributors submitting notes, many notes remain stuck in limbo, unseen and unevaluated by fellow contributors, a crucial step for notes to be published.”

Meanwhile, Meta has jumped on the community notes bandwagon, introducing the tool popularized by X to replace fact-checkers in a bid to restore free speech and freedom of expression to its platforms, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in January this year.