X plans to DM users when posts they engaged with are corrected

X owner Elon Musk has announced a proposal to update Community Notes, the platform’s crowdsourced fact-checking system, so that it sends users a direct message whenever a post they interacted with receives a correction. The update is not yet live, and it remains a proposal, assuming it goes live.

Community Notes was originally established when X was still called Twitter, before Musk’s acquisition, as a way to address misinformation without making the platform a centralized moderation authority. Meta adopted a similar crowdsourced system last year as part of its own broader moderation overhaul. The crowdsourced model lets X distance itself from the business of fact-checking, rather than adjudicate disputes directly.

Yet studies show the system struggles to scale. A 2025 study by Maldita, a Spanish fact-checking site, found that 85% of the proposed notes on X remain invisible to users, and only 8.3% get published and become visible. A separate study by the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA), a research group that analyzed 1.76 million notes published on X between January 2021 and March 2025, put the figure for unpublished notes even higher, at 90%. Critics have pointed to this gap as a reason users who saw or shared a post — including those who may have spread false information without knowing it — never learn a correction was issued at all.

Why it matters

The proposed update targets a central criticism of Community Notes: that corrections often arrive too late, after a misleading post has already spread. By proactively notifying users who interacted with a corrected post, X is attempting to extend the reach of fact-checking beyond the original post itself.