Elon Musk's X starts allowing Indian contributors to Community Notes ahead of Lok Sabha elections

X said that Community Notes contributors will initially start with the ability to rate notes and over time, and earn the ability to write notes

Elon Musk-owned X (formerly Twitter) said on April 4 that it has started allowing people from India to join the company's crowd-sourced fact-checking programme Community Notes, weeks before the Lok Sabha polls.

The programme, which was previously called Birdwatch, allows contributors to add notes that provide more context on potentially misleading posts by either fact-checking it or providing additional information around it.

Users can then rate these submissions on how helpful it was and if enough contributors with diverse perspectives rate the note as helpful, it will become publicly visible to all users.

In a post on X platform, the social media firm said that the first set of contributors from India will be joining today with plans to expand it over time.

"As always, we’ll monitor quality to ensure that notes are found helpful by people from different points of view," the company said in the post.

With this rollout, Community Notes now has contributors in 69 countries across the world.

The firm said that any user on X whose account meets the eligibility criteria can sign up as a contributor. The criteria includes having an account that is atleast six months old, along with a verified phone number and has not violated any rules since Jan 2023.

Contributors will initially start with the ability to rate notes and over time, earn the ability to write notes, X said.

It's worth watching how this programme pans out in India. X lifted the ban from political ads last year, although even ads are subject to fact-checking by contributors of Community Notes.

Any controversies arising from such fact-checking may cause further challenges to the X platform, which has already had run-ins with the Indian government regarding compliance with regulations.

In February 2024, X said that it will withhold, under protest, specific accounts and posts in India based on blocking orders issued by the government.

"In compliance with the orders, we will withhold these accounts and posts in India alone; however, we disagree with these actions and maintain that freedom of expression should extend to these posts," the official Global Government Affairs account of X said in a post at the time.

The company is also still fighting a case against the Indian government for ordering the platform to block certain posts in 2022.

Under the old management, the social media firm had placed 'manipulated media' label on several tweets made by senior BJP leaders in May 2021, a move that had triggered an investigation by the government.

The company's New Delhi office was raided by the police and then India MD Manish Maheshwari was served a notice as part of the investigation at the time.

On its website, X however notes that Community Notes do not represent its viewpoint and it cannot be edited or modified by the company's teams.

"A post with a Community Note will not be labeled, removed, or addressed by X unless it is found to be violating the X Rules, Terms of Service, or our Privacy Policy" the social media firm noted on its website.

What others are doing?

In recent weeks, many tech companies including Facebook parent Meta and Google have outlined their plans to combat election-related misinformation.

Earlier this week, Meta expanded its third-party fact checking programme by announcing a partnership with news agency Press Trust of India (PTI). Through this partnership, PTI's fact-checking unit will identify, review and rate content as misinformation across Meta's platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

With this partnership, Meta said that it now has 12 fact-checking partners in India, making it the country with the most third-party fact-checking partners across the world.

Google also announced a range of steps it is taking to help people navigate AI-generated content and discover high-quality voting information ahead of the general elections. This includes rolling out restrictions on the types of election-related queries for which its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Gemini will provide responses.