The Community Notes feature was launched in India on April 4, and allows users to flag misleading posts by adding additional context, with users voting for whether other users’ ‘notes’ are useful or not.
Even as news organisations and fact checking outlets pushed back on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s claims that the Congress’s manifesto promised to divert resources from Other Backward Classes and Scheduled Castes to Muslims, one fact checking mechanism notably failed: Community Notes on X.
The feature was launched in India on April 4, and allows users to flag misleading posts by adding additional context, with users voting for whether other users’ ‘notes’ are useful or not.
No posts on X by PM Modi or the BJP on the subject have been successfully flagged by the feature, a review by The Hindu found. The feature appears to not be displaying fact checking notes at all for polarising content from the BJP over the past few weeks. That does not mean that people are not writing draft community notes on such content — rather, notes in total disagreement to any given post are being submitted but these community notes are not actually being approved and shown to X users.
Users who have been approved to suggest Notes on X have flagged some posts by PM Modi featuring the rhetoric that he and his party have pushed in recent days. One video posted on May 7 features Mr. Modi urging voters to “choose between Ram Rajya and Vote Jihad”. One note submitted by a user under this post said Mr. Modi appeared “to target groups, inciting divisions,” and that doing so was a model code of conduct violation, while another argued that since the term was coined by a Samajwadi Party leader (something Mr. Modi does not mention in the video), he was actually “calling the opposition out for [a] communal electoral conspiracy.”
This story was originally published in thehindu.com. Read the full story here.