The Roll-Out of Community Notes Did Not Reduce Engagement With Misinformation on Twitter

Developing interventions that successfully reduce engagement with
misinformation on social media is challenging. One intervention that has
recently gained great attention is Twitter's Community Notes (previously known
as "Birdwatch"). Community Notes is a crowdsourced fact-checking approach that
allows users to write textual notes to inform others about potentially
misleading posts on Twitter. Yet, empirical evidence regarding its
effectiveness in reducing engagement with misinformation on social media is
missing. In this paper, we perform a large-scale empirical study to analyze
whether the introduction of the Community Notes feature and its roll-out to
users in the U. S. and around the world have reduced engagement with
misinformation on Twitter in terms of retweet volume and likes. We employ
Difference-in-Difference (DiD) models and Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD)
to analyze a comprehensive dataset consisting of all fact-checking notes and
corresponding source tweets since the launch of Community Notes in early 2021.
Although we observe a significant increase in the volume of fact-checks carried
out via Community Notes, particularly for tweets from verified users with many
followers, we find no evidence that the introduction of Community Notes
significantly reduced engagement with misleading tweets on Twitter. Rather, our
findings suggest that Community Notes might be too slow to effectively reduce
engagement with misinformation in the early (and most viral) stage of
diffusion. Our work emphasizes the importance of evaluating fact-checking
interventions in the field and offers important implications to enhance
crowdsourced fact-checking strategies on social media.