X's Community Notes Struggles with South Asian Languages, Calls for Diversity
X's Community Notes, a crowdsourced fact-checking feature, faces global challenges, particularly with posts in South Asian languages. Despite representing a significant user base, these posts receive less attention, leading to delays, inaccuracies, and inconsistent coverage.
Most moderators of Community Notes are based in the US, using English as the primary language. While notes in South Asian languages are marked 'helpful' as often as English ones, they fail the bridging test at a higher rate (60% vs 40%).
During crises, note-writing activity surges, but the system struggles to keep up, leading to drafts piling up when real-time context is crucial. The scarcity of reviewers who speak South Asian languages and hold varied viewpoints results in accurate notes being stalled and misinformation remaining visible.
X announced a pilot to let AI chatbots draft notes, but this risks magnifying existing gaps in performance for South Asian languages. Posts in these languages, representing a quarter of the world's population and five percent of X's monthly users, account for only 0.094 percent of the Community Notes archive. Only 37 out of 1,608 notes in South Asian languages have ever appeared on the public timeline.
To address these issues, X should expand and diversify the reviewer pool, recognize linguistic realities in the Notes publication algorithm, and implement a civility filter at submission. This will help ensure that all users, regardless of language, receive accurate and timely information.
