The crowdsourced verification tool of social media giant X seems to be falling short of its main objective: to pinpoint and flag widespread misinformation.

An analysis from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which recently legally challenged X’s CEO Elon Musk, has highlighted that the platform’s feature, Community Notes, isn’t effectively reaching a large portion of its user base. Despite over 160,000 X users proposing notes in 2024, a substantial number of fact-checking alerts were noticeably absent on posts related to elections and politics. Furthermore, even when applied correctly, confirmed Community Notes failed to appear on almost 75 percent of posts disseminating election-related false information. These misleading posts gathered over 2 billion views.

“Community Notes are produced by a system where anonymous users register, create and evaluate labels for posts that deliver fact-checks or furnish context or additional information to deceptive posts,” stated the center’s CEO Imran Ahmed. “We assume X’s novel approach to community-based decentralized fact-checking was intended to be a democratic and transparent process where users engage in discussions and agree on jointly established facts. However, social media platforms and our democracies don’t function in this manner.”

X’s dependence on the community fact-checking system, which the center describes as “flawed”, coupled with the tool’s reported limited reach, creates a concerning scenario ahead of what might be a highly disputed presidential election, already rife with partisan misinformation aimed at undermining the process and the results. Recent research, praised by X, indicates that users are increasingly trusting Community Notes over expert fact-checking.

A separate data study by the Washington Post confirmed the tool’s inconsistent presence, noting that when notes do appear, they are four times more likely to be approved on posts from Republican politicians than from Democrats. The study revealed that one in ten of Musk’s own X posts have received proposed notes.

X recently announced that it was enhancing the Community Notes tool prior to the election in response to complaints that notes are increasingly delayed on the platform. The upgrade, dubbed Lightning Notes, will reportedly enable notes to appear less than 20 minutes after a post is published. However, the notes can only appear on posts that have already been flagged, leaving many to fall through the moderation cracks.

That’s not the only misinformation challenge the platform is facing ahead of the 2024 election. A BBC report this week detailed the growing networks of accounts that are profiting from the viral spread of misinformation online. By controlling dozens of such accounts, these lucrative networks post and amplify each other’s election misinformation, AI-generated images, and conspiracy theories to boost engagement with premium accounts, resulting in higher payouts.

“Posts without Community Notes promoting false narratives about US politics have gained billions of views, exceeding the reach of their fact-checked counterparts by 13 times,” the center clarified in its report. “Community Notes is not a solution for all of X’s issues.”