Who Checks the Checkers? Exploring Source Credibility in Twitter’s Community Notes

In recent years, the proliferation of misinformation on social media platforms has become a significant concern. Initially designed for sharing information and fostering social connections, platforms like Twitter (now rebranded as X) have also unfortunately become conduits for spreading misinformation. To mitigate this, these platforms have implemented various mechanisms, including the recent suggestion to use crowd-sourced non-expert fact-checkers to enhance the scalability and efficiency of content vetting. An example of this is the introduction of Community Notes on Twitter. While previous research has extensively explored various aspects of Twitter tweets, such as information diffusion, sentiment analytics and opinion summarization, there has been a limited focus on the specific feature of Twitter Community Notes, despite its potential role in crowd-sourced fact-checking. Prior research on Twitter Community Notes has involved empirical analysis of the feature’s dataset and comparative studies that also include other methods like expert fact-checking. Distinguishing itself from prior works, our study covers a multi-faceted analysis of sources and audience perception within Community Notes. We find that contributors most often cite mainstream news and institutional sources with moderate or left-center bias and high factuality. Right-leaning or lower-factuality outlets appear more often in supportive notes, while highly factual and neutral sources are used to refute claims. Notes citing credible sources receive higher agreement, suggesting that Community Notes effectively rewards accuracy and reliability.