How Community Notes reduce viral misinformation | Keith Coleman, Jay Baxter
6/10/202629 min
Community Notes on X started with a wild idea: Instead of tech companies deciding what's true, what if you let people fact-check each other? Jay Baxter and Keith Coleman, who helped build the crowdsourced system adding context to misleading posts, discuss how the program reduces viral misinformation — and why people across the political spectrum trust it. In conversation with TED guest curator Audrey Tang, they discuss how their "surprising agreement" algorithm could reveal the common ground that quietly exists across a polarized internet. (Followed by a note from TED guest curators Divya Siddarth and Audrey Tang)
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First 90 secondsElise Hu· Host0:00
[pensive music] You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. X, formerly called Twitter, is now using Community Notes, a crowdsourced fact-checking system. The company's algorithm architect Jay Baxter, and its VP of product, Keith Coleman, built it, starting with the question: What if the people got to decide what's true? If people don't trust tech companies to draw the line, could they draw it themselves?
Jay Baxter· Guest0:34
You can download the real data, uh, the Community Notes and ratings, run the code on the data to verify that there's no funny business that we're doing on our end. Like, there's no override button. Um, so it's really the, you know, by the people.
Elise Hu· Host0:45
It's an idea that has earned genuine interest and trust across the political spectrum, even as it's become entangled in a larger, more contentious debate about the dismantling of professional fact-checkers. In this conversation, Jay and Keith sit down with TED guest curator and civic technologist Audrey Tang to discuss how Community Notes actually works.
Keith Coleman· Guest1:08
If we can identify common ground at internet scale, it'll make it a lot easier to create a future that humanity likes.
Elise Hu· Host1:15
They also talk about what they're working on next. And stick around. After the talk, we caught up with the TED guest curators Audrey Tang and Divya Siddharth, who share a few more thoughts and takeaways on Community Notes for us to consider.