Elon Musk’s X Expands Community Notes to India, Allows Users to Become Contributors

Elon Musk-owned social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) expanded its Community Notes’ contributor positions to India on Thursday. With this development, Indian users can apply to become contributors to this open-source moderation tool to rate and review posts that are misleading or are spreading misinformation. Community Notes was officially introduced in November 2022 but at the time of launch, moderators were only selected from a few countries. Now, with the addition of India, the tool has contributors from 69 countries.

The announcement was made via a post by the official account of Community Notes. It said, “Welcome new contributors in India. Our first contributors are joining today, and we’ll be expanding over time. As always, we’ll monitor quality to ensure that notes are found helpful by people from different points of view.” Musk also posted about the development.

Becoming a Community Notes contributor is easy but users will have to fulfill some eligibility criteria. As per X guidelines, the user must have joined the platform at least six months ago, have a verified phone number from a trusted phone carrier, and have no recent platform rules violations. The account should not be associated with other Community Notes accounts.

Once these requirements are met, users can apply to become contributors here. The process just requires highlighting the languages a user is proficient in and agreeing to X’s terms and conditions. However, one thing to note is after joining as a contributor users will not directly be able to review or rate posts. Contributors will only be able to rate Community Notes to denote how helpful they are. Based on the regularity of rating notes and accuracy in assessing the posts, a user can later be contacted by the platform to become a contributor who writes Community Notes for others to rate.

Interestingly, before November 2022, Community Notes was known as Birdwatch. Birdwatch was introduced in 2020 as a moderation tool to identify and debunk misinformation and propaganda. However, after Musk took charge of the social media platform, he rebranded the tool and made it open-source. X states that the feature is not controlled by it and only users rate and review posts. Further, the platform publishes all the Community Notes data daily which can be downloaded for inspection.