[pjc50]

Interesting that Community Notes is mentioned, because it's by far the most reliable anti-"disinformation" mechanism I've seen.

The "bluecheck" system has been absolutely wrecked, though. Even with the haphazard patching of grey and gold ticks, a bluecheck more often than not is the sign of self-promoted nonsense.

[ajsnigrutin]

Yep, the great thing about community notes is, that it leaves the tweet unchanged and just adds context (or refutal, or whatever). It turns censorship into (hopefully) "argumented refutal".

[2devnull]

Did people actually rely on the bluechecks anyway in the first place? For me it was at best a slight help if I was trying to find a celebrity that had impersonators. I would be surprised if I’m a very typical user of course. But still I had the impression the bluecheck system was fondly replaced.

[rsynnott]

> For me it was at best a slight help if I was trying to find a celebrity that had impersonators.

Yes, that is literally what it was designed for, and the only thing it was useful for.

It’s now, I suppose, useful for identifying people to avoid, but it’s no longer useful for preventing impersonation.

[DoughnutHole]

> For me it was at best a slight help if I was trying to find a celebrity that had impersonators.

That's exactly why it was useful. Major institutions and public figures have impersonators, some satirical and others intentionally misleading. The check made it easy to sift what actually came from someone and what was either lies or satire.

On that front it hasn't gotten too bad because the grey and gold checkmarks exist.

Now blue checkmarks are a sign to ignore the tweet because it's someone who's just paid to boost their signal. Of course this has rendered the thread of replies to a given tweet unusable since the top posts are all posts by people who have paid to be seen rather than posts with more likes or retweets (actual signals of value/popularity).

[fallingknife]

It was actually a great system. All those Elon free crypto giveaway scam accounts could make a profile that looked exactly like Elon Musk, but they couldn't get that blue check. It was great when it was a completely neutral system to state only "this account is who it says it is." But then they ruined it by removing the checks from people with unpopular political opinions, even though they were in fact the official account of that person, and then it became seen as a sort of political endorsement from Twitter.

[SiempreViernes]

I know of one example where community notes was used to spread outright lies about the victim of police brutality a full day after the claims were disproven, so it still needs some work.

[actionfromafar]

Another amusing thing right now, X marked a journalistic article about Tesla as "spam, misleading or violent":

https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/sverige/x-marker-lank-till-...

[immibis]

I don't understand why Elon hasn't hijacked Community Notes for his own purposes yet.

[fallingknife]

Of course they will come after that. Because when the government says "remove disinformation" they mean "remove things that we don't like," and community notes doesn't do that.